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(Snappier name on the way!)
To all Full Members and Conditional Members of the Series (and friends),
It's about 5:00 am as I write this, two days before Thanksgiving. There is absolutely no way I'm going to let another day go by
without getting this second Newsletter out.
The reaction to the Series continues to astonish all of us at Hill House. As I've mentioned to many of you in emails, we thought
perhaps 15% or 20% of those who inquired about Neil's limited editions would be interested in joining the Series. The actual
number turns out to be more than 90%.
I've also mentioned that Members of the Series will be receiving a few surprise gifts along the way. . .in addition
to A SCREENPLAY by Neil Gaiman, of course. More on this later.
Newsletter Name Contest
In the brief email that accompanied the first edition of the Newsletter, I made mention of a special gift for the Member
who came up with the best name for this newsletter. Even though I wrote that note almost as an afterthought, I received a
blizzard of suggestions. So to be fair to newer Members (and to those who might have missed my first email), I'm going to
make this a formal contest: Send us your suggestions for a new and snappier name for this newsletter. Deadline for
submissions is Dec. 15th, 2003. At that point we'll review all the submissions with Neil and come up with a winner, to
be announced in the following issue of the Newsletter. We'll also list ALL the submissions we received. (And to those
who sent in suggestions already, I've already got a bulging file holding them safe and sound, so you needn't send them in again.)
Send all submissions to: HillHousePub@aol.com and include the phrase "Newsletter title contest" in the subject line of your email.
THE MAKING OF. . .
One reason why it's taken us so long to get this second newsletter out is that we've been working on a special Members-Only (no,
not the jacket) hidden website page.
I originally intended the article you'll see there to be a few paragraphs about The Making of
the AMERICAN GODS Limited Edition—as you'll see, it ended up a lot longer than that.
To access this Members-Only Hidden Link, go to the Hill House website's home page: HillHousePublishers.com Then scroll down the
page all the way to the bottom. There's a Hill House logo there in the center of the page. Normally, clicking on the logo
would bring up an email form. Now, however, your click will bring you to the new pages.
There's a lot of information there, and I'm sure you'll have some questions or comments, so please feel free to write in and
let us know your thoughts.
A Surprise is on the Way
I'm sure you're sick of hearing about these "surprise gifts" already. However, we're pleased to announce that every Full Member
of the Series will be receiving within the next few weeks a. . .well, it's a surprise, so I can't tell you. All I can tell you
is that it will be a great addition to your Neil Gaiman collection. And again—it's something that ONLY Full Members will
receive—ever! They won't be offered for sale or given away at any point.
Pete Atkins Speaks!
After numerous pleadings and veiled threats on my part (made all the more difficult by the fact that he lives in LA and I
live in NY), Pete Atkins finally acquiesced to writing a piece for the Newsletter. "It's only got to be a paragraph or so,
Pete," I said. "Just to let the Members know you truly exist outside of that horrid photo of you on the website." Here's
what I finally received:
Hello, Members (as the actress said when she wandered into the steam-room of naked Bishops). Young Schneider has
told me that many of you (okay, three of you) have asked to hear from me in these Newsletters. Happy to oblige—as
long as you understand that my writing here is not going to help you find us when we catch a tramp freighter to
Rio. Following is a little anecdote about my old chum Neil. It might be the first in an occasional series. Might
not. Depends when the fake passports come through.
Neil Gaiman, Humanitarian Icon
by
Pete Atkins
Places, like people, have their moments in the sun. For the Café Munchen, a snacks'n'booze establishment in central
London, its Warholian fifteen minutes lasted a few years (end of the 80s, beginning of the 90s, something like that, can't
remember, too many drugs) during which it serviced a clientele composed of media-types—people who worked, or were eager
to appear as if they worked, in publishing, Film, TV, or comics. It was spacious, friendly, and cool—though cool, with
hindsight, in a nauseatingly Thatcherite manner; lots of bulging filofaxes, jurassic cell-phones, and credit-card tabs for
liquid lunches.
Anyway, the point of Café Munchen as far as this story goes is that it was a place where Neil and I would often meet to
drink, smoke, and explain to each other with delicate and loving regret why every other writer of our mutual acquaintance
wasn't quite as brilliant, witty, and talented as our brilliant, witty, and talented selves. (If it makes us seem less like
the obnoxious little shits we undoubtedly were, I can assure you that at other tables on other days all other writers of
our mutual acquaintance were unquestionably doing the same to us.)
So we're there one afternoon chatting away—probably, given the period, talking about anything except our great unspoken
topic; the crushes we each had on Anne Bobby, an actress friend of ours—when something most untoward happened.
You need to understand that the Munchen had one of those entrance-ways that, for London, bespoke a climatic-optimism that
bordered on the delusional; wide, inviting, doorless, open to the elements. And through said entrance-way had come a
pigeon. And through said pigeon had come the kind of paralysed impotence that is known only to urban boys and girls when
confronted with Living Nature. Birds lived in cages or shat on statues. They didn't fly free at full-speed in the confined
spaces of London cafés. Or rather, when they did, we didn't know what the hell to do about it.
The poor pigeon dive-bombed the Munchen's plate-glass windows in a panic to be out of there for what seemed, in perceived
time, to be many minutes but which was, in chronological, probably one at most, until—exhausted, confused, and dazed—it
settled on the mock-marble floor between the tables and the bar and waited, consciously or un-, for a saviour to rise from
the ranks of the chattering classes.
Enter Neil Gaiman, hero.
Yeah. No shit. Neil—who prior to this moment had given me no indication that the blood that flowed in his veins was indeed
the blood of Drake, Nelson, and Churchill—rose from our table and approached the bewildered bird.
While the rest of us remained in our seats, pretending to be busy and silently thanking Christ that some other idiot was stepping
up to the plate, Neil—despite several false-starts when the pigeon's anxious wings would beat furiously in an attempt to
dissuade him—eventually got hold of it and, cradling it between his palms with a visible gentleness, walked it to the
entrance-way and set it free. There was no round of applause from the café-habitues but there damn well should have been.
Now, only after the twelve years mandated by the Official Secrets Act, I can reveal that that very pigeon was the pigeon
who, two days later, flew up in front of a moving Taxi on Regent Street, causing it to spin to the left and side-swipe a
street-vendor's sandwich-stand. Which caused the vendor, unharmed but shaken, to shut up shop early that day and bugger
off back to Stoke Newington. Which meant that Dmitri Vaselovich couldn't purchase the planned cream-cheese and banana
sandwich in the distinctive green plastic wrapping prior to a certain rendezvous in Hyde Park at seven minutes past
three. Which meant that Koullis Violaris (an émigré of curiously imprecise biography), not seeing the recognition-signal
that the Russian was supposed to be holding, turned the other way along the Serpentine and left Dmitri cooling his heels
on a park bench alone. Which meant that the state visit from the Lithuanian President went off without incident or
assassination attempt. Which meant no reprisals. Which meant no escalation. Which meant no deployment of strategic
nuclear devices in European capitals. No Dr. Strangelove scenarios. No end of the world. Thank you, Neil Gaiman.
Yeah, okay. That last paragraph's a load of shit. But the rest of it's true. And Neil remains a hero in my eyes even
if he didn't actually save the world. The Munchen, by the way, went through several name-changes over the ensuing
decade but I don't think it ever quite reclaimed its hip-place-of-the-moment status. I like to think that it reached
its zenith as the spot-to-be the day that Neil saved the pigeon. That's probably not historically accurate but when
it comes to historical accuracy I tend to side with John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I choose to print the legend.
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Hmmmm. Well, thanks, Pete.
The Lettered Edition
And finally, some news about the Lettered Edition.
First, there will be 52 copies of the lettered edition published, lettered A-Z and AA-ZZ. If you look at the AMERICAN GODS
page on the Hill House website, you can see a prototype of the box that will contain the lettered edition. Please remember: this
is just a prototype! I addressed some of the production issues about the Lettered in the last Newsletter. (If you did not receive
the last Newsletter and would like to read this piece, write to me at: HillHousePub@aol.com and I'll send it off to you.)
As I mentioned in that column, we were still waiting for prices on production of the box. Last week we received the prices, and
my eyes are still wide with shock. It's a very intricate and luxurious case, to be sure, but were we to simply charge what the
box cost on a per/unit basis, it would come to. . .well, let's just say a figure that's many multiples of the price of the
numbered edition.
So I've finally found a local craftsman who is even now working on a finished prototype for our approval. We've already
discussed costs, so I can (guardedly) state that the final price for the lettered edition will be $700. That's a lot of
money, we realize, but we can assure you that it will be worth it. Each of the Hill House lettered editions for the Neil
Gaiman series follow a theme—the concept of "doorways" or "portals." Readers of Neil's work will see that each of his books
contains this theme, either in a metaphysical sense (i.e., The House on the Rock in AMERICAN GODS) or in a more
concrete sense (the door in CORALINE, the gate in STARDUST, etc.) In fact, our original concept for the
series of limiteds had a too-cute-for-words title of "The Threshold Variations." The door on the front of the
AMERICAN GODS lettered is modeled on The House on the Rock. Each subsequent lettered edition will feature a door
on the front that reflects the theme of doorways within that book. We'll keep the same dimensions for each lettered case,
so when displayed on a shelf (and it better be a strong shelf!) you'll have a row of different doorways, all portals into
the works of Neil Gaiman.
Finally, we're going to offer all Members the opportunity to upgrade their Membership to a Lettered status. I'll announce
the full details of this in a soon-to-follow email to all Full Members, but please note that if you do choose to upgrade,
you will NOT have to pay another dime until your Lettered Edition is ready to ship.
So it's time to wrap this thing up. . .my wife, Jennifer, is now stumbling around in her pajamas looking for coffee—but the
fact is, I've already drunk the whole pot this morning. So I better go make some more.
And as always, we look forward to receiving your thoughts, comments, and questions on any element of the Series.
We wish you all the best, and once again, thank you for your enthusiasm and your support.
With all best wishes,
Peter Schneider & Peter Atkins
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