One of my goals for Lividian Publications is to publish beautiful collectible books while keeping the retail price as reasonable as possible.
For The Night Country, I produced the Lettered Edition the same way most small presses have for as long as I’ve been in this business. The printer made enough “book blocks” (internal guts) for the Limited Edition and the Lettered Edition, and then finished them accordingly: different bindings, endpapers, signature sheets, etc. But the insides are basically the same.
I've never really liked this, but being the guy who has written the spec sheets and gotten the quotes for more than three hundred Limited Edition books over the years, I certainly understand why special editions are usually done this way. Printing totally separate guts is crazy expensive because the print run is so low, and it gets even more expensive if you upgrade to nicer paper and, perhaps, full color printing.
That said, publishing the “regular” Lettered Editions differently is something I've really wanted to try, and I see this as a way of pushing the boundaries of what is possible for a beautiful special edition while trying to keep the retail price under control, relatively speaking.
So, for the Lettered Edition of The Chill, I worked with the same boutique printer and hand-binder who made the Lettered Editions of Revival and 20th Century Ghosts to print and bind The Chill Lettered Edition separately from the Limited Edition, just like I do for the Stephen King and Joe Hill books.
The Chill Lettered Edition was printed on the same heavy weight and textured specialty paper as those King and Hill titles, and we upgraded the entire book to full-color printing, including all the interior artwork, which only appears in B&W in the Limited Edition. (Check out the photos on the product page – the artwork is absolutely stunning in full color on this high-end paper stock!)
The final “form” of the Lettered Editions (binding and clamshell case) will be similar to The Night Country, so these will still look good together on the shelf for those of you collecting all of our Lettered Editions, but the production values for the insides of The Chill are vastly improved from The Night Country. A tremendous amount of manual labor went into producing this edition in the hopes of making it more beautiful and special than a “regular” Lettered Edition.
So, the next step in the process is to see if collectors actually like and want what we've done, and then we can decide how to proceed in the future.