Good Is Dead.

As you may or may not know, Bat-Manga! is being released on October 28 simultaneously in hardcover and paperback. The hardcover is a limited edition with an extra 32 pages of material—and not cheap, at $60. Regarding this last point, someone in the Pantheon sales force thought it would be a good idea if I signed…all of them. Now, I want to do all I can to make this book a success, so I agreed:

“Sure. Oh, and how many copies are we talking about?”

“Let’s see. Um, six thousand.”

“What? Six thousand constitutes a LIMITED edition?”

“Let me check. Wait, that’s wrong. It’s not six thousand.”

“Whew.”

“It’s seven, actually. Seven thousand.”

“Oy.”

The original plan was to ship me down to our warehouse in Westminster, MD, once the books came in. There I would “camp out for a few days” as books were removed from boxes, opened, signed and returned to boxes and re-sealed.

This didn’t sound good. Once I stopped crying, our intrepid head of production, Andy Hughes, came up with a better idea (just like he always does!). The answer was to do it before the books were actually bound. Andy arranged to have all the front endpapers shipped flat to our offices, and the plan was to unpack and sign, repack and ship back to the bindery. Which would be easier, certainly, but it still meant signing my name 7,000 times. Hmmm. Also, we were on strict deadline. The sheets were due in on a Wednesday, and to keep the book date they had to go back out to the bindery by that Friday afternoon. Gulp.

The key was to establish a sort of ‘assembly line’ system, which involved many of our dedicated Knopf Group interns. The endpapers were positioned two on a sheet, so I had to sign at the top and bottom of each page. With a stack unwrapped, I would sign willy nilly, and the sheet would be instantly yanked and transferred to another stack, to be re-wrapped. At first my terror at meeting the deadline led me to do the most cursory ‘signature’ possible: squiggle, dot, squiggle, dot, next! But once the sense of pacing became clearer, I realized I could actually do a real signature and still get it done on time.

In the end, we did it in two days no problem, and all the sheets went out as scheduled. A big hearty thanks to our interns, who really made this happen, and to Vanessa Schneider and Altie Karper at Pantheon. Apparently, in terms of orders, all the hardcovers are spoken for—so hopefully this wasn’t in vain.

And don’t forget: we’ve got Chip’s full Bat-Manga! presentation from this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, in eight short video clips starting with the one below—“Jiro Kuwata, an Introduction”—for your viewing pleasure here.

That sounds pretty damn tiring..
Just ordered mine from Amazon..so ALL the hardcovers editions are signed?

Lefty! Sounds like a ridiculously good time.

Concrampulations on signing all 7,000. I hope you had a good masseur waiting in the wings.

NICE

Say—is that Japanese signature to the right of yours by Jiro Kuwata?

My husband signs about 100 employee checks every two weeks. He would have to sign 35 months worth of checks to equal your task.

Usually by the time he reaches the 60th check, his signature looks like initials and vertical lines.

You should’ve contacted the Guinness Book to see if you could have a record entry!

Wait a sec, i’m confused, is that the hardcover? The hardcover i’ve seen doesn’t look anything like that. Sorry you had to go through that Chip.

Just wanted to let you know that I made an article for Bat-Manga!, see ‘http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat-Manga!:_The_Secret_History_of_Batman_in_Japan’.

Good day.