In the last ten years, The Folio Society has increased the number of science fiction, fantasy, and horror books it’s published. A limited-edition hardcover edition of Stephen King’s It, featuring illustrations by Jim Burns, recently sold out in less than seven minutes. I spoke with Folio Society Head of Editorial James Rose to learn more about the project — and the logistical challenges that come with publishing a novel as massive as this one.
When did The Folio Society decide to release an edition of it? And did the size of this particular novel pose any logistical challenges that you hadn’t faced before?
Particularly with the limited editions, we’re programming usually a couple of years in advance, two or three years ahead. And we’ve done a number of Stephen King books. Going back about five or ten years, we started doing things like Frank Herbert’s Dune and George R.R. Martin and things like that. We started looking more into horror books; I think we started with Stephen King with The Shining and then Misery and Pet Sematary.
One that we had wanted to do for a long time was It. And you’re absolutely right, it is literally a monster of a book. It’s so huge and so long that we really weren’t sure exactly how we would even be able to do it. More than any other Stephen King book, it’s sort of entered our pop culture lexicon, and we really wanted to honor it with the limited edition treatment. That meant that we could do more with it, we could bring to it more illustrations, which a book of this size requires. And we could just give it a different treatment — so one of the things we’re able to do is put a leather spine on it to keep it as it one volume.
There are physical problems with binding books that large. So the bookbinders have had to go in and reinforce the spine, so that it won’t damage over years of use. This edition will stay together and part of that is giving it this leather spine, which adds to the rigidity and stability of it.
We knew we would have these obstacles to overcome, but giving it the limited edition treatment enabled us to bring all of that in, and to house it in a clamshell box rather than the slipcase, which adds to that protection so that we know it’s not going to get damaged. And we were able then to commission the artist to do — not just five or six pictures but 17 or so. I think it was 11 double page black and white illustrations and six double page color illustrations. Giving ourselves that two or three years of planning really enabled us to approach that and be able to do that with this book.
When you’re working with a book by a living author, does that change the way The Folio Society approaches a project like this?
We approached the publishers to acquire the rights, and they don’t give over any Stephen King rights without Stephen’s approval, so he is involved. My contact with him on this one was actually through his agent, but everything I sent to her went to him. She basically just copied me in with his replies so I know that he is seeing everything.
I think we do have to run everything past him. Getting Stephen King’s approval for anything that we do to a Stephen King book is hugely important to me and to Folio, and to know that we’re producing something that he is happy with, something that he’s proud of and pleased with, is really important for us. We really needed to get that right, so every little detail really went through him. Any changes that we made editorially, even the layout of the text once we’d laid it out, I sent it to him just so he can have a look at it.
Before we even commissioned the illustrator I sent samples of his work to Stephen King saying, “This is who I’d like to commission for it.” For all those little stages — the rough illustrations, the final illustrations, the cover artwork, the whole thing — we got his approval.
Jim Burns did the illustrations for this volume. Did you have an existing relationship with him? What’s your process like for finding the right illustrator for a particular project?
Finding illustrators for books is always a fun challenge. It’s one of the best bits of it I think. And you’re trying to find an artist where you see something in their work that you feel is going to be right for the book. Each of us editors have a list of artists that we’d love to work with, but we also go out and scout for new artists and this sort of stuff.
We went to Worldcon, which was held in Glasgow last year. And it was at that that we finally met Jim. I knew of his work before, mostly his science fiction work. I knew of him really because he’d won the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist. I think he’s won it three times and as far as I know he is still the only British artist who have ever won it.
He was at Worldcon exhibiting some of his works, and we got chatting with him. On the train back from Glasgow, the publishing director and I were talking, saying, “What can we get Jim to do? We’ve got to find a book for Jim.” We saw in his science fiction illustration something that we knew would work for It.
We put it to Stephen King, who said he loved the idea. And then we went to Jim and said, “Look, it’s a big project. Are you really going to have time to do this, to do it justice?” He said, “I will make time for this.” He was really keen to do it and you know we were absolutely blessed to get him. I think he’s done a fantastic number on it.
Guillermo del Toro did the introduction, I believe. When did he enter the process?
Really early on. Guillermo has been a fan of Folio for a number of years. He’s bought books from us and he’s introduced for us in the past as well. One of the things that we start doing when we start putting books into the program is to try to think about who would illustrate it and who would introduce it. Guillermo’s name came up really early on.
I had a bit of an inkling that I thought he wanted to do it so I dropped him an email, and he was right on board with it straight away. It’s a fantastic introduction; a lot of it’s quite personal, I think. It charts his childhood growing up with Stephen King’s novels. He charted his own literary development and his own development through horror writing and all of that has fed into his own outstanding body of work.
I can remember seeing a traveling show of his collection of horror ephemera a few years ago, and I was really floored by the breadth of it.
I mean, he really lives and breathes this stuff, doesn’t he? That also fits with It, because the monster’s different manifestations are taken from these young kids’ own fears, but particularly what they’re influenced by — the creatures from 1950s horror movies.
You were talking a little bit before about the decision The Folio Society made a few years ago to expand into publishing more genre books. What led to that taking place at the time it did?
It was a thing that had been growing for a little while. Particularly in the UK, we were a book club, essentially, and we broke that mold and said we didn’t want to do that anymore. It wasn’t working for us in the end anyway. We knew we wanted to shift things around. We made our name doing what one would term “classic literature” — Charles Dickens and that sort of thing. But within that we flirted a little bit with classic horror, so you know we’d published Dracula and Frankenstein and things like that.
The more we looked around the more we saw that genre fiction was growing and growing and the fan base for it was just becoming stronger and stronger. That was something that we wanted to reach out to. And it’s sort of played into our own interests; we were reading Dune and George R.R. Martin and more horror books and more modern books anyway.
Ten years ago, about 80% of our list was older books, out of copyright. And now it’s really done a complete 180; only about 20% of our books are out of copyright and the rest of it is all in copyright. That was a shift that we knew we wanted to make, and part of that was opening up our publishing to a much wider area. Including that came genre fiction, far more science fiction and fantasy and horror as well.
As a reader, do you have a particular strain of horror, fantasy, or science fiction that you particularly enjoy reading?
I try to read generally and widely across the category. One thing I’ve always liked, particularly in fantasy and horror, is when the author bases fantasy within the real world. Someone like John Crowley’s Little, Big or Robert Holstock’s Mythago Wood.
Mythago Wood came into my life at a formative age and really left a mark on me.
We’re really lucky that we’ve got John Howe, who is known for his Tolkien illustrations, to work on Mythago Wood. Guillermo, in his introduction, talks about Stephen King being able to mix the mundane and the extraordinary. And that’s what a lot of horror books that I like do. It has the world of 1950s America, they’re having the same trials and tribulations as every other kid you know — bullies and rubbish parents and other stuff and they’re exploring themselves and their own freedoms.
We’ve done quite a lot of Shirley Jackson now, but every time I go back to a Shirley Jackson book, it’s always so fresh and new. else. And Rosemary’s Baby. That’s another one where it’s a totally mundane, ordinary New York couple that are having a baby, but into that comes all of these different elements. And that blew me away as well. I thought that was fantastic.