Since early 2020, I've been volunteering my help to a very special book project--an archival, art book, 40th anniversary edition of our friend John Crowley's beloved novel Little, Big illustrated by Peter Milton, see https://littlebig25.com/
Winner of the World Fantasy Award when it was first published in 1981, Little, Big is a novel of depth and wonder, written in a prose that has a transformational, almost inebriating effect on many readers. It has enamored such diverse admirers as ethnobotanist Kat Harrison, to musician Maynard James-Keenan (of Tool, A Perfect Circle, Puscifer); counterculture historian Erik Davis, to Yale literary critic Harold Bloom; who said “Little, Big seems to me as miraculous as Shakespeare or Lewis Carroll...” and felt Crowley to be among the greatest living novelists. Best selling author Michael Chabon is a huge fan, as was psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna. Acclaimed storyteller Ursula K. LeGuin called it "Indescribable: a splendid madness, or a delightful sanity, or both... A book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy". World renowned writer Neil Gaiman acknowledges it as “one of my favorite books in the world”.
For many readers Little, Big is more than a novel, it is an an enchantment, an alchemical engine of the imagination.
Peter Milton is an artist of spectral vision and singular skill. The 334 reproductions in the new volume were chosen from 49 of Milton’s etchings and engravings, a preponderance of which were executed on large copper plates (which on average took a whole year to create!).
Crowley’s fiction and Milton’s art were created completely independent of each other. Astonishingly much of Milton’s art echoes and reflects the themes, feeling-tone, and imagery found throughout Little, Big. It is almost as if each man had unknowingly illustrated the other’s work!
The new edition of Little, Big is an utterly unique presentation where art, tale and book design interpenetrate, co-emerging as an animate entity unto itself; a “magical artefact” of a book.
Publishing this unique new edition has been a 20 year saga, stalled by sundry issues. I've had the pleasure of corresponding with celebrated fantasist Neil Gaiman, who is now a major supporter of the project, along with my friend Erik Davis. Their generosity has helped revivify the project and allowed printing to finally begin in 2022.
The project's architect and publisher, Ron Drummond, had a stroke June, 2022, after which book designer John D. Berry and myself were tasked with overseeing the last stage of production and making sure all was in order to distribute books. Just updating the 18 years of customer records proved a considerable task; my volunteer work since summer 2022 has almost become a 2nd full time job. We are excited to report that the project is nearly complete, the hardcover edition finally began shipping January, 2023. You can watch a delighted Neil Gaiman unboxing his preview copy https://journal.neilgaiman.com/ (or direct onYouTube)
Stock of this unparalleled limited edition is already running low and is expected to sell out soon! Copies can ordered through: https://store.deepvellum.org/products/little-big
I first stumbled across Little, Big among the relics of an antique store in the mid-90s--like some enchanted flotsam washed to our shores from another time. A few years later, as the century turned, I became friends with John Crowley when, in a fit of post-modern literary criticism, I named a Trichocereus cactus hybrid I developed after his novel Daemonomania. Around the same time I made friends with editor/publisher Ron Drummond. As an early supporter of this wondrous new iteration of Little, Big, I'm honored and grateful to contribute to the manifestation of this marvelous book.
Trichocereus ‘Daemonomania’
I have a life long love of stories. Through my work with 'traditional' cultures I have come to a deep appreciation of how integral and essential storytelling is to humanity's relations with itself and every aspect of the world, from the potential potency of narratives to act as cultural progenitors and mutagens, to the possible ecological agency of stories. I am increasingly curious how the awareness of such things manifest in contemporary fiction and how such puissance can be harnessed by modern mythmakers and storytellers. No modern storyteller has had a greater influence on how I feel and relate to facets of my work and life than John Crowley.
A few years ago I presented a friend involved in ecological restoration a copy of Little, Big. He had read John Crowley's Engine Summer and spoke of it with a reverence and awe usually reserved for scripture, but had not read any of the author’s other works. Some time after my gift of Little, Big I gave him a set of Crowley's Aegypt tetralogy. Months later, while discussing that prodigious series he admitted that he’d not been able to bring himself to finish the last 50 or so pages of Little, Big for fear that the spell would be undone, the fairies unreal, the prose would turn to simple words devoid of animacy. He then shared that as a child he was aware of some vitality that spirited the world, something that the child’s mind equated with and experienced as fairies and gnomes—a magic agency of things. A “sweet unreasonable air of wonder” he once lived in. He then had a pivotal experience of being ridiculed for this sensitivity to such “commonplace impossibilities”. He was made to see Fact & Reason by authoritarian dictate. Soon such magic fled, evaporated before his now educated gaze. Things became just things. He matured and his education strode boldly forward into the measurable, quantifiable realm of science. So completely enraptured by the enchantment of reading Little, Big, he feared it would follow this same course by the end of the Tale. I encouraged him to finish the novel. He eventually did and later on shared he had found some reconciliation if not healing to his childhood trauma. The real and the imaginary ceased to be perceived as contradictions, but as a complementary whole. At the denouement the Tale moves away from us; the fay move further (ever) inward, the players move to become fay, and us; the reader, move terminally away from the Tale —yet with true fay logic and Crowley’s vatic prose; with the magic receding from us (and us from it) it somehow also moves closer; arrives home. There we see it, feel it, know it in the melancholy antipodes of the heart—which still empathically resonate and whisper sensual dialogue with the world around us; with birdsong and the sighing of the trees, the sun-baked flavor of summer, the odor of deep green grass, with twilight’s cool caress, with the creaks and groans of old houses…
