A heartfelt Happy Birthday to artist Peter Winslow Milton, who turns 80 today. One of the greatest joys of the Little, Big Project, for me, has been the chance to work with and get to know Peter and Edith, his wife of forty-nine years. (Edith Milton née Cohn is a fine writer who deserves to be much better known; I strongly recommend her literary memoir The Tiger in the Attic: Memories of the Kindertransport and Growing Up English , University of Chicago Press, 2005.)
I spoke with Peter a few days ago and his vitality, wit, passion, and intellect are those of a genius thirty years younger; his artistry continues to astonish and inspire, as his latest work, Dress Rehearsal (2009), amply demonstrates. I believe Peter Milton ranks amongst the greatest living visual artists; he too deserves to be much better known, and one of my many hopes for our new edition of Little, Big is that it will not only bring greater attention to a superb novel but also to the work of a truly amazing, one of a kind artist.
Meanwhile, book designer John D. Berry and I are making steady progress towards finalizing production on Little, Big. We expect to go to press in May, with books starting to ship in August. I must ask again for your continued patience and support; we’re almost done.
In recent weeks, we created and fine-tuned the family tree, which will be published on the inside front and back covers of the book. And we are continuing to work through the book’s art, executing final changes, which will include the addition of a half dozen or more details from Dress Rehearsal, plus a few more details from Tracking Shot (2008); another twenty-odd images will be cut. (The current count is 326 art details in the book as a whole, though that will likely change by plus or minus twenty details by the time we’re done.)
Just today I received a letter from John Crowley regarding two Milton art details that are slated to appear 298 pages apart, the latter a close-up of the center of the former; I’d asked John for his sense of whether the repetition worked, given the textual context of their respective appearances. Crowley wrote, “I think the two instances are actually fine — the subtle connection between the two pages makes the picture an echo rather than a contradiction. My first thought about the first instance is that it wrongly amalgamates Auberon into the wolf/cat-headed smoker person, who’s so much more powerful and magisterial than poor old Auberon. But thinking about it I see that the moments when Auberon was taking his pictures of the children this is how he felt — huge, strong, gentle, magnificent, distanced. It’s not stated in the text but the picture supplies that. Nice.”
I cannot conclude this update without once again providing a link to the PDF of the title-page spread, for those who may have missed it.
More news soon.
Best Wishes,
Ron Drummond
Publisher, editor, art director