Category Archives: Books

Books

The Subterranean Option

I love e-books and e-readers.

With that out of the way, I also love physical books. Not in the ‘real books smell awesome!’ kind of buzzfeed-happy hippy activism that seems to be going around nowadays, nope. I would prefer that the physical version of a book be something that brings its personality to life. It would have to be the kind of entity that needs to be on a shelf, as an extension of my own love for the contents of the book itself. A volume that feels good to possess, re-read and show off.  Paperbacks do not quite cut it, and I find that given a choice between an ebook and a paperback, I would prefer the former – just to avoid clutter. But if it is a book I love, and if there is an edition that screams at me to buy it, that’s when the wallet comes out. (he said, taking his pipe out of his mouth and with a sip of his chardonnay)

Subterranean Press is a small-press publisher from Michigan that publishes limited edition printings of (mostly) fantasy and science fiction titles. These are copies that come designed with a lot of care and attention, and the lettered editions in particular set enviable standards. Of course, the prices reflect both the exclusivity and the attention that the publishers lavish upon these books. Which tends to limit my spending quite a bit, not a bad thing at all. They are not the only ones doing this – there’s a whole other bunch of publishers such as Cemetery Dance, Centipede Press, and PS Publishing that do nearly the same thing. Here’s a site where you can read more about these editions. But it is SubPress that I have a special fondness for, and not without good reason.

For one, this company has been publishing the works of Joe Hill, one of my favorite authors at the moment. My first purchases with them were editions of Horns, and the first two volumes of Locke and Key. Horns was a beautifully slip-cased “trade” edition, because the limited eds had sold out by then, and I got it signed by Hill at a Wonder Con 2012, soon after. The two Locke and Key volumes came with the scripts, just the second example I have seen of comic-scripts being bundled with the comics themselves, the other being the first two Absolute volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I have been meaning to get the limited edition of Hill’s first book – Heart-Shaped Box, but the crazy eBay prices deter me. Last year, when NOS4A2, Hill’s vampire opus was due to be released, I kept a close eye on the SubPress release, meaning to buy it as soon as the pre-orders went up. Alas,. I was traveling outside the country, and by the time I was back, all 750 copies were gone. When the books finally shipped, after-market prices went through the roof. I could only gnash my teeth as copies sold for upwards of 300$, on a cover price of 125$. I did keep a close eye on eBay auctions and the occasional sane market-place dealer (Bett’s Books, for example. One of my favorite booksellers because their prices are pretty reasonable, specifically for Stephen King limited eds. But even they did not have a SubPress copy of NOS4A2 under 200$) Nope, nada, zilch.

Until last week, when I happened to check the SubPress newsletter just as it came in. And this is what it said: (under the heading A Surprise)

Twenty-two Copies of NOS4A2 Up for Grabs

Important Note: We pulled the last copies of NOS4A2 out of our collectors room. If you’ve already purchase a copy, you are not eligible to purchase another. (When the buy button disappears from the NOS4A2 page, it means all the copies are sold out.)

 

Needless to say, before you could say “SHAZAM!”, I jumped on the page. With the speed of Mercury, I entered my credit card details and clicked on the BUY button with the power of Zeus. It took the courage of Achilles after the transaction failed the first time, to realize that it was not because the 22 copies were sold out, but I had entered the wrong expiration date on my card. The wisdom of Solomon came to my rescue, and I repeated my exercise. Boom, tish!

A few days later, the glorious package landed up on my doorstep. It does require a bit of the strength of Hercules to pick the oversized volume, and I am saving the stamina of Atlas for when I re-read it. I have to, the book has an alternate ending and a novella that comes with it, and by golly, I love it enough to reread it. Also, while the other SubPress Hill books were illustrated by Vincent Chong, the illustrations in NOS4A2 are  by Gabriel Rodriguez, Hill’s collaborator and co-creator of Locke and Key. Rodriguez not only designs the lurid cover, but also a bunch of full-color character illustration bookplates scattered throughout the book, and black-and-white chapter illustrations. Icing on the fucking cake, man.

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Books, Weirdness

The Meaning of Life

The more you look at the history of Homo sapiens, it’s all about movement, right from the very first time they decided to leave Africa. It is this restlessness which seems a very significant factor in the way the planet was settled by humans. It does seem that we are not settled. We think we are, but we are still looking for somewhere else where something is better – where it’s warmer, it’s more pleasant. Maybe there is an element, a spiritual element, of hope in this – that you are going to find somewhere that is wonderful. It’s the search for paradise, the search for the perfect land – maybe that’s at the bottom of it all, all the time.

A History of the World in 100 Objects (Neil MacGregor)

The world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.

Humans were built to look back; that’s why we have that swivel joint in our necks.

Kids forget. Every teacher knows this. And they think they’re going to live forever.

11/22/63 (Stephen King)

It all goes back and back to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance on in our steads.

The lines that explain what those Darn Seven Books are all about.

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Books, Manga

Impulse Buy of the Day

I don’t do this often, but when a book comes highly recommended by the Sage of Northampton, bears a foreword written by him, and is signed by both the author and the Foreword Writer, I do not argue with Fate. Bought immediately, and paid for international shipping too. The reviews on Amazon are glorious, and reminds me of pre-Jonathan Strange/Mr Norrell buzz for Susanna Clarke. (And that reminds me that I should probably reread that book too).

From the foreword:

A genre that has been reduced by lazy stylisation to a narrow lexicon of signifiers … wizards, warriors, dwarves and dragons … is a genre with no room for Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, arguably the earliest picaresque questing fantasy; for David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus with its constantly morphing vistas and transmogrifying characters; for Mervyn Peake’s extraordinary Gormenghast books or for Michael Moorcock’s cut-silk Gloriana. It is certainly a genre insufficient to contain the vegetable eternities of Catling’s Vorrh.

Here’s where you can buy a signed copy. (No guarantees though, as the small print says.) Apparently all of the signed copies are sold out, and I got one. The confirmation email came in today morning.

Other than that, I have been rereading some old manga favorites. Among them is Crying Freeman. I bought the complete Dark Horse set a while ago at the low low price of $1 per volume – I have the Viz comics and you will agree that reading them pamphlets gets a little annoying, even though some of the coloring adds to the eightiesness of the series. It’s over-the-top seinen action, with lots of photo-referenced art by Ryoichi Ikegami, and it is just as I remembered it – brimming with the kind of content that sets librarians and conscientious parents aflutter, the kind of salacious visuals that attracts giggling clusters of school-kids in Landmark, where the books stay misfiled in the children’s section. Crying Freeman is the kind of thing Dr. Fredric Wertham warned the world about, people. Do not file it in the children’s section, not unless you want kids to wonder why women have white areas in their groin, whether Chinese assassins really strip to their underwear before jumping up on Russian wrestlers’ shoulders, and if it is possible for a man to cover himself in cement and not burn to a crisp when attacked by a janitor with a flame-thrower. And how a Japanese man can be a master artist, a master assassin, and the Greatest Lover Ever. This book is testament to the fact that manga writer Kazuo Koike is what Stan Lee would be without the Comics Code Authority to keep him in check. And Crying Freeman is what an Amitabh Bachchan character would really be in the 70s, without the castration anxiety of the Indian Censor Board. Mull about the ocean of possibilities for a while.

This reminds me that the high-point of Comicon this year was getting to meet Koike in the flesh. I queued to meet him three times, just because there was a 2-item cap on signatures; I probably would have gone a few more times had there not been other events to attend. Kazuo Koike, man. Never thought I would get to thank him in person. Insert a twenty-one gun salute moment for Dark Horse Comics here.

The other series I read – after a gap of nearly seven years – was Planetes by Makoto Yukimura. Long out of print, I picked up the series on a whim from a collector whose bookshelves I emptied back when I was an established Emptier of Bookshelves, a veritable patron saint of Liquidators. (Ironically, swathes of my floppy comics are now making their way to different parts of the world, as I succumb to Omnibus upgrades). Coming back to Planetes, this is the sort of manga that serves as a gateway to anyone not used to the medium. It’s a series of interconnected glimpses into the lives of a motley crew on board an orbiting garbage disposal unit, set in the year 2070 or thereabouts, when mankind has made a little more progress in space travel. Over the course of 5 volumes, we see how the passage of time affects the daily lives of the astronauts, how their lives and those of the ones they love have intertwined, and the effect that a planned Jupiter Exploration has on them. It is the kind of manga that floats around in your brain after you have finished reading it, with a bewildering attention to detail and a penchant for capturing the exact texture of a moment in time. If you have read Ba/Moon’s Daytripper or Thompson’s Blankets, you know what I mean. It’s a shame it’s not available on the market at the moment, I wish someone like Vertical would bring it back in an Omnibus (they totally can, it’s Kodansha). I would probably buy it for everyone I know.

There is an anime based on the series. I know it’s good, from all the buzz I have heard about it, but I have to finish it some time. I stopped at 2 episodes the last time I started. Or you can read the manga online, for free.

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Books

The Quotable Jaron Lanier

futureuscover

I usually do not take notes when reading a book, but Jaron Lanier‘s Who Owns the Future is a delicious collection of insights about our modern world that just begged to be remarked upon. This book had the rare quality of making me rethink my own standpoint about the digital economy.

These days music is more than a need to be met. Musicians who seek to make a living are goaded by the preferences of the marketplace into becoming symbols of a culture or a counterculture. The counter-cultural ones become a little wounded, vulnerable, wild, dangerous, or strange. Music is no longer a nutrient to be supplied, but something more mystical, a forge of meaning and identity: the realization of flow in life.

***

Copying a musician’s music ruins economic dignity. It doesn’t necessarily deny the musician any form of income, but it does mean that the musician is restricted to a real-time economic life. That means one gets paid to perform, perhaps, but not paid for music one has recorded in the past. It is one thing to sing for your supper occasionally, but to have to do so for every meal forces you into a peasant’s dilemma. The peasant’s dilemma is that there’s no buffer. A musician who is sick or old, or who has a sick kid, cannot perform and cannot earn. A few musicians, a very tiny number indeed, will do well, but even the most successful real-time-only careers can fall apart suddenly because of a spate of bad luck. Real life cannot avoid those spates, so eventually almost everyone living a real-time economic life falls on hard times. Meanwhile, some third-party spy service like a social network or search engine will invariably create persistent wealth from the information that is copied, the recordings. A musician living a real-time career, divorced from what used to be commonplace levees like royalties or mechanicals, is still free to pursue reputation and even income (through live gigs, T-shirts, etc.), but no longer wealth. The wealth goes to the central server.

***

Money forgets. Unlike the earliest ancient clay markings, mass-produced money, created first as coins—and much later on a printing press—no longer remembered the story of its individual conception. If we were to know the history of each dollar, the world would be torn apart by war to an even greater degree than it already is, because people are even more clannish than greedy. Money allows blood enemies to collaborate; when money changes hands we forget for at least a moment the history of conflict and the potential for revenge.

***

Liars have to have the best memories. It’s more work to keep two sets of books than one set of books. The plague of toxic assets and mega-pyramid schemes, and the pointless growth spurt of the financial services sector would all have been impossible without vast computational resources remembering and sorting all the details needed to snooker people. The most egregious modern liars not only need computers, they can be inspired by them.

***

In antenimbosian* days, a local baker could deliver fresh bread more readily than a distant bread factory, even if the factory bread was cheaper, and a local banker could discern who was likely to repay a loan better than a distant analyst could. Each person who found success in a market economy was a local star.

Antenimbosian : ‘before the cloud’. What a lovely word!

***

You never know how long it will take for scientific conclusions about big data to form. Science gives up the best punch lines ever, but delivers them with the most inconsistent timing.

***

In either case, once a Siren Server starts to get fooled by phony data, a dance begins. The Server hires mathematicians and Artificial Intelligence experts who try to use pure logic at a distance to filter out the lies. But to lie is not to be dumb. An arms race inevitably ensues, in which the hive mind of fakers attempts to outsmart a few clever programmers, and the balance of power shifts day to day.

Lanier uses the term ‘Siren Server’ for giant corporate farms of computers, that collect freely-volunteered information about our lives without consent, and are now being used for huge financial benefit by a super-rich few. The term “Siren” is used in the Greek mythological sense, and not in the fire-engine sense.

***

Every little genetic feature of you, from the crook of the corner of your eye to much of the way your body moves when you listen to music, was framed and formed by the negative spaces carved out by the pre-reproductive deaths of your would-be ancestors over hundreds of millions of years. You are the reverse image of inconceivable epochs of heartbreak and cruelty.

Just among the many delightful lines Lanier throws in about music and its effect on humankind.

***

We have been obliged to invent our way out of the mess caused by our last inventions since we became human. It is our identity.

***

For better or worse, however, we technologists have made Kirk’s Wager: We believe that all this work will make the future better than the past.

***

Here’s typical advice I’d give to someone who wants to try the Silicon Valley startup game: Obviously you have to get someone else to do something on your server. This can start out as a petty activity. eBay started out as a trading site for people who collected Pez candy dispensers. The key is that it’s your server. If you’re getting a lot of traffic through someone else’s server, then you’re not really playing the game. If you get a lot of hits on a Facebook page, or for your pieces on the Huffington Post, then you are playing a little game, not the big game.

***

These click-through agreements are the grandiosely verbose descendants of the Zen koan about a tree falling in a forest that no one hears. No one will read them, so they are very unlikely to be tested in a legal proceeding. No one wants to read them, not even lawyers. Some lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation or some such place might occasionally be able to make it through one of them, but that is rare. Since they are unread, they basically do not exist, except for setting the basic rule everyone understands, which is that the server takes no risks, only the users of the server.

***

Seeing movies and listening to music suggested to us by algorithms is relatively harmless, I suppose. But I hope that once in a while the users of those services resist the recommendations; our exposure to art shouldn’t be hemmed in by an algorithm that we merely want to believe predicts our tastes accurately. These algorithms do not represent emotion or meaning, only statistics and correlations.

***

The successful guru is neither universally nor arbitrarily scornful to followers, but there should be enough randomness to keep the followers guessing and off guard. When praise comes, it should be utterly piercing and luminous, so as to make the recipient feel as though they’ve never known love before that moment. Apple’s relationship with its customers often followed a similar course.

Jobs imported the marketing techniques of India’s gurus to the business of computation. Another way in which Jobs emulated the practices of gurus is in the psychology of pseudo-asceticism. Consider the way he used physical spaces. Jobs always created both personal and workspaces that were spare like an ashram, but it is the white Apple store interior that most recalls the ashram. White conveys purity, a holy place beyond reproach. At the same time, the white space must be highly structured and formal. There must be a tangible aura of discipline and adherence to the master’s plan.

***

Economics is not about your taste. Economics, once people have risen above basic needs into the middle class, is about the tastes of other people, whether you like it or not. It’s hard to say how much of the present-day economy is based on taste instead of need, since, as Abraham Maslow pointed out, the line shifts. At the very least, not only entertainment, but titanic industries like cosmetics, sports and recreation, tourism, design, fashion, hospitality, dining, hobbies, grooming, cosmetic surgery, and the majority of the activities of geekdom ought to count as “tastes” that have turned into needs as far as commerce is concerned.

***

To survive, the book business has to define a product for the upper horn, for the rich. In the music business, that upper tier takes the form of insanely expensive audiophile equipment and super-high-quality limited editions on vinyl. In the book business, there should be hyperlimited editions of books like this one, hand copied by monks onto handmade paper, using organic fair-trade inks, and sold only in VIP rooms at parties where almost no one can get in.

***

Civilization will remain by definition a mostly voluntary project, a miracle.

***

The book is too idealistic a read, at times. It does not veer into futurism and utopian worldviews, but just barely. Will be interesting to see how its views hold up in a few years.

And finally:

The core ideal of the Internet is that one trusts people, and that given an opportunity, people will find their way to be reasonably decent. I happily restate my loyalty to that ideal. It’s all we have.

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Books, Events, Myself

Neil Gaiman at the Alex Theater, 27th June 2013

 

You know, I had never attended a Neil Gaiman signing before. Events, yes, two of them, in fact, but I did not have a car back then and waiting in line to get stuff signed and run the risk of missing my last bus on a weeknight did not appeal to me. Last Thursday, at Alex Theater in Glendale, I attended my first Gaiman signing. It lasted till 2:40 AM, they say. I was in the first few rows on account of having gotten a premium ticket, and I headed out of the auditorium at 11:15 PM. Despite the lack of a lunch and a dinner, and various other adventures during the day, I felt great. And more than a little sorry for both Neil Gaiman and his legions of fans, who had stood in line around the block for about six hours, and sat in their seats, patiently, as the ushers invited them up on the stage row by row. It is not without reason that the man is called the most hardworking author in the business – he has earned his legions of fans not only by his writing, but also by the remarkable respect he shows to the people who come to see him at one of these events.

And what a bunch of people! To my right was a lady clutching a hardcover of Fragile Things, who held the guy next to her very close and said “my boyfriend is the best boyfriend in the world, he got us these excellent tickets and surprised me”. I could see she meant it too. On my right was a teenage boy, his teeth in braces, a nervous smile on his face. I met him when he was standing around at the reception, looking lost, an awkward smile on his face. “Go and say hi to Neil”, I said to him. “No”, he replied. “I am not interesting enough.” We were among the last of the premium ticket holders to go in, and consequently ended up sitting together. There was the comics crowd, holding their mylar-enclosed copies of Sandman #1 and Black Orchid close to their bodies; excited Whovians; the dressed-up-in-their-Sunday-best-on-Thursday crowd, white-haired couples sitting next to teenagers – holding Gaiman books and hands. Eyeliner and designer tattoos, summer hats and flower-patterned dresses, black suits and Neverwear t-shirts, I looked around the theater and it felt glorious.

“You are a very clappy crowd”, Neil began, as the opening applause died down. The conversation with Geoff Boucher began with a discussion about a writer’s need for applause, the desire to evoke reactions from his viewers. Neil spoke about the best crowd reaction he had ever gotten, at a reading of a chapter in The Graveyard Book when he stopped at a crucial point in the story. This was followed by long, insightful conversations about things such as how personal and truthful Ocean was (“it is a mosaic that looks pretty, and as you go closer, you see it is made up of blue dots and green dots and red dots, and only the red ones are true”), how hard it is to be fresh and new with his writing, on the advantages of writing in long-hand, with a fountain pen. He mentioned how his first draft of the Neverwhere short story “How the Marquis got his Coat Back” was derailed because he could not work with the paper on the notebook that he used – “And this may sound like I am being a prissy writer, but I am not. A fan gave me this notebook he had constructed out of paper that he had made himself, with crushed rose petals on every page. The only problem with that, as it turned out, was that the rose petals would clog my pen on every line and I had to clean it. I wrote half a page with a description of the Marquis’ coat, and then I gave up and forgot about it for many, many years.” The two other important things about writing in long-hand was that he used different colored inks on different days so that gave him an idea of how much he was writing every day, and it made it easier for him to discard material when he was finally typing it into a word processor, because it was “too much work”. He also talked about why he chooses not to reveal much of what he is working on until he is done. “There was this project that was killed by my agent before I even began working on it”, he said. “She asked me what I was working on, and I told her excitedly about this story I had in mind, about a boy who wants to be famous, and the simplest way for him to do so is to go to Disneyland and kill Mickey Mouse.”  After a long pitch came the punchline, delivered by Neil in the lady’s dead-pan voice: “Not exactly high-concept, is it, dear?”  It led him to throw away the idea and his retelling of it made us laugh like delighted school-children.

He then read from one of the opening parts of Ocean, after asking his audience how many had read the book. (Not too many, though a great number were done with their books by the time they had to queue up for the signing). I had, and after hearing his reading, I was tempted to order the audio-book, just to hear his rendition of the complete thing.

Then there were questions. There was one direct from Stephen King, read out loud by one of the organizers. At the risk of mangling the words, the question asked something like: “Do fantasy writers have a better conduit to their subconscious?”, to which Neil responded with a lengthy – and very funny – explanation of how his recurring nightmares became a fertile source for Sandman situations. “I would dream about a baby in the basement with an incision in its abdomen and it crept towards me slowwwly. And I would think to myself: ‘that’s a good one!’ At some point, the ones responsible for sending those nightmares my way must have given up in disgust.” Another audience question referenced a piece of advice Stephen King gave Gaiman: “You should enjoy this, all of this”. As Neil explained, this came at a time when the relentless Sandman touring and monthly scripting was taking its toll on him, and the term “Fraud Police” came up – the idea floated by Amanda Palmer that with success comes the worry that some day, They are bound to find out that it was a fluke, and They would take you to task for fooling your audience into thinking that you are clever when you are not. He used this piece of advice to make peace with the fact that he was good at what he did, and he liked it, and with it came a bunch of pluses and minuses and he was ok with all of it. “Tea helps. Bee-keeping helps, because every writer needs a hobby that could kill them. Having a dog helps. But I would not recommend cats at all.”

And then he side-tracked into a brilliant explanation of what it is like to write with a dog in the room, against writing with a cat. The dog stays in one corner, looks at you and tells you that you are the best writer in the world, and that you are doing great, and that everything will be fine. The cat, on the other hand, looks suspiciously at you, climbs up on the desk and tries to sit on the keyboard, and finally tells you: “You missed a comma there.” This is truly the highlight of attending a talk by Gaiman – he ends up crafting hilarious, personal stories out of nearly every question. Much like his writing, there is a particular spontaneity to it, the right turn of phrase, the correct pause before a witty response, an unexpected observation about the world that was always hiding under a sofa in your brain and which he, like a guest making himself comfortable in your mind, pulls it out with a flourish and makes you say “Aha!”.

Other things that happened: how the Dr Who episodes came to be. The fact that the boy you see at the back of the book cover is Neil Himself. Another reading, this time from Fortunately, The Milk, his children’s book that is out in September, and which is a response to Father’s Day gifts of The Day I Swapped My Dead For Two Goldfish; it involves aliens, time-traveling dinosaurs, and pirates and I just pre-ordered it. The surprise he felt on being #1 on the NY Times Bestsellers’ list, especially with a Dan Brown book out. (“Take that, Dan Brown”, somebody from the audience shouted. We cheered.) An antivirus warning occasionally popped up on the screen behind him, causing a moment of mirth.

It was time for the signing. There were a good number of rules for the event, everybody could get as many copies of Ocean signed as they wanted to, but only one other item, and only one of these could be personalized. People with mobility issues and with children at home were given preference, and anybody who wanted to skip the signing could just exchange their book (which came with the ticket to the event) with a signed copy outside. The first person to be up on stage was a little girl, presumably because it was a school night. The ushers queued people in order of their rows, and the lines proceeded briskly.

I had had a terrible day. I was in San Jose until the morning, thanks to a conference. A week ago, the time of the event had moved an hour earlier to 5:30 PM (the main reading event to 7) so that the signing could get over early. I re-booked my flight from San Jose from 2:45 PM to a morning flight 3 days before the event, and that flight was cancelled, I was moved to one at 3:45 PM instead (yes, an hour after my scheduled flight). Much gnashing of teeth, pleading and being zen at the airport happened, and I managed to get myself aboard the 1:50 PM flight. Upon reaching the airport parking lot, I found out that my car had a flat tire. Deep breaths when changing it. By the time I got home (I had to, I needed to pick my books up), it was already 4:30. Google Maps showed ETA for the venue as 6:15 PM. At that point, I decided to just forget about the reception and be in good spirits for the actual signing. Reached at exactly 6:15, after some cloggy moments on the freeway. Saw the lines that went around the block and gave myself a high-five for my decision to cough up extra money for the VIP ticket.

When I got to the reception, the lady at the counter warned me, with a sad look on her face, that there was only 15 minutes before it ended. I got in, however, to find out that Neil had come out to greet everyone just 5 minutes ago. He was being mobbed by hordes of fangirls. “You didn’t miss anything, except the sliders”, a guy standing next to me said. The food was being cleared even as Neil made his way through the room. I managed to catch his eye, and showed him the two pages I was carrying, my Eddie Campbell page that featured him. “Oh, I had never seen this before”, he said, and spent some time admiring it. Then I showed him the Bolton Desire splash, and he gave me some suggestions about how to frame it, because I said I wasn’t too sure. “Good luck”, he said, as he gave me the pages back. “Uh buh guh buh”, I replied. And cursed Google for not releasing Glass yet.

From Eddie Campbell’s Alec.

I met him again for a few minutes, at the signing. He took a short break to meet someone backstage just as it was my turn, and I spent time talking to the lovely Lauren Cook, who was one of Neil’s Elves, working to make the signing events go smoothly. She talked about how much they had to travel and some of the logistical challenges – as an example, they had to remove the table-cloth from the signing table because the big books (like the Absolute Sandmans that some brave souls lugged with them, or its Big Daddy, the Annotated Sandman) did not slide too well on the table and it was slowing down the process. After a while, Neil came back, and took off his jacket, revealing himself to be wearing a black t-shirt underneath. Making sure his pen was sharp and inky, he signed my books. I told him about my day, and he smiled, looked up, and said: “But you are finally here, and that is a good thing.” I told him why the only personalized copy of Ocean was not for me. I wanted to tell him about the story behind my copy of American Gods when he was signing it, but did not want to take more of his time. Just as I was taking the books back, he asked me if I wanted my Eddie Campbell page signed. “Because I kept you waiting”, he added.

Neil Gaiman did to me what he did to every single person in that auditorium. And I can say this with certainty – even though I did not stay back till the end of the signing – because I could see it in the happy, goofy smiles on the face of every one person who came down from the stage that evening. Neil Gaiman Made My Day.

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