Gaiman, Neil (2020) ‘Stardust’, UK signed and numbered limited edition published by Lyra’s Books

– This Leather edition is limited to one hundred copies for general sale and is signed by the author and artist. Six additional copies are reserved for the author and artist and are numbered with Roman numerals.

– This edition is fully bound in dark blue smooth calfskin with additional gold ‘dust’ sprinkled by hand. This means that each copy of this book will be different from any other.

– All three page edges are gilded.

– Endpapers are made with handmade marbled paper.

– The curved edge slipcase is lined with suede and covered with purple cloth. The Charles Vess ‘Stardust’ design is stamped in gold to a large leather label on the front side.

– All text is letterpress printed from polymer plates on 148gsm Mohawk Superfine paper.

– All illustrations are tipped on plates with tissue guards.

The publisher about the design:

The design of this special, limited edition of ‘Stardust’ has been heavily influenced by the books of the ‘Golden Age of Illustration’ from the early part of the 20th century. These were the days of book illustration giants such as Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen and Edmund Dulac who were illustrating the Brothers Grimm, Aesops Fables and other fairytale classics. I believe that ‘Stardust’, if it had been published at that time and illustrated by Charles Vess, would not have been out of place in the company of those masterpieces.

The magical story by Neil Gaiman, and the gorgeous illustrations of Charles Vess are a perfect fit, just as Kay Nielsen was a perfect fit with ‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’, or Edmund Dulac with ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’. My attempt with this special edition is to put the text and art into a format which I believe is fitting for the style of book and the style of painting. The page layout is very similar to those ‘Golden Age’ books, with extra-large margins and a compact text block. The illustrations in two of these editions are tipped on plates with tissue guards, just as was so often the case with Rackham et al. Occasionally, especially in the later trade editions, they did not have tipped on plates and were instead printed directly to the page. Those pages were then hand tipped into the book – this is what we will be doing with the Standard edition.

The only real change I have made is to omit a frontispiece. The reason for this is that Charles Vess provided us with the most beautiful, full colour title page and the book simply does not need another image on the facing page. It would be too much. Instead, that additional image has been moved inside with the rest.

There will be nine wonderful, full colour illustrations by Charles in this illustrated edition of ‘Stardust’ plus the title page. Three of these illustrations are new, the other six are older but did not appear in the original DC edition. Charles has also written a new foreword for this edition.

Source: https://www.lyrasbooks.com/shop/stardust/leather/