The following is an interview with Beehive Books editor Josh O’Neill regarding the recent release of Pinocchio: The Illuminated Edition by creators Mike Mignola and Lemony Snicket through the publisher’s Illuminated Editions imprint. In this interview, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief Barbra Dillon chats with O’Neill about what readers can anticipate with this new edition of the fan-favorite tale, why the Illuminated Editions releases offer such incredible benefits to the reader, and more!
Barbra Dillon, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief: Congratulations on the release of Pinocchio: The Illuminated Edition! As the editor of Beehive Books, what are you most excited for readers to experience with this new edition?
Josh O’Neill: To start, I’m excited for folks to experience the original text – well, the translated English text – of Pinocchio. Though Pinocchio is one of the best-selling books of all time – I believe it’s translated into more languages than any book besides the Bible – sometimes, amidst the cavalcade of adaptations into film and stage and animation, Collodi’s original story gets lost. Our edition wants to pull you back to Collodi’s text. The story of Pinocchio, as Collodi told it, is full of betrayals, poisoners and assassins, hideous transformations, accidental deaths and resurrections, and countless other violations and bedevilments to go along with all its magic, musicality, humor, and warmth.
To do that, we worked with two of the great imaginative voices and storytellers of our time – Mike Mignola and Lemony Snicket are both singular, visionary chroniclers of black humor, of the odd and enchanted, of horrors and sensations a little too vast for the mortal mind. Mike’s portfolio of illustrations invents a whole new visual tone and setting for Collodi’s strange and troubled puppet-world.
And Lemony Snicket delivered something so wonderfully bizarre it’s a little hard to explain: a collection of annotations of the text in which he, Snicket, encounters Pinocchio for the first time, and is slowly driven mad by it.
All of which resulted in this eerie, hilarious, gorgeous, and troubling thing – as befits a text to which all of those adjectives can apply.
BD: This book marks the latest release from Beehive Book’s acclaimed Illuminated Editions imprint, which has become synonymous with high-quality and impeccably presented reimaginings of literary masterworks. What can you tell readers about the creative process of infusing new life into such a well-known story by creative powerhouses like Mike Mignola and Lemony Snicket?
JO: Thank you for the kind words! Our whole ongoing series – which has taken on texts like The Great Gatsby, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, and The Island of Doctor Moreau, with artists like Dave McKean, Yuko Shimizu, Brecht Evens, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Jim Woodring – is a chance to see beloved books with new eyes. Not just to create a beautiful visual edition of a classic, but to find some novel and exciting vision of it. Our hope is that the illustration portfolio and the text coalesce in the reader’s experience into some newly invented third thing. It’s always a big of an adventure trying to figure out how to do this.
The particular project sort of grew of its own strange accord, based on the incredible creativity of our collaborators.
It was Mike’s vision for his own version of Collodi’s puppet-world that launched the entire undertaking. It occurred to us that Lemony Snicket, who wrote the astounding suite of novels known as A Series of Unfortunate Events, would be the perfect author to comment on this book, which is itself a series of very unfortunate events.
So, we asked him for an introduction – but he offered us something so much more fascinating and compelling: a collection of annotations of the text in which he, Snicket, encounters Pinocchio for the first time, and is slowly driven mad by it.
Our biggest contribution at Beehive was the idea to present these not as traditional footnotes, but as hand-typed slipped-in typesheets, covered with coffee stains and revisions and tell-tale signals of incipient authorial madness. Our art director Maëlle Doliveux typed these herself, on a travel typewriter during a cross-country road trip.
BD: At Fanbase Press, our #StoriesMatter initiative endeavors to highlight the impact that stories can have on audiences of various mediums. How do you feel that this new opportunity to discover a classic fairy tale may connect with and impact readers?
JO: I think novels are always a window into the time and place of their creation, and Pinocchio gives us a chance to travel to a circus-mirror version of post-Unification Italy. But that’s an extraordinarily nerdy answer, I suppose.
Let me try again: Collodi’s Pinocchio is a wild picaresque in which a string of strange and horrific events befall a foolhardy wooden puppet-child, thereby shedding light on the cruelties of society, the redemptions of family, and what it means to be human. Like a lot of my favorite works of fiction, it feels in some way like it’s at war with itself. It’s a moral lesson about responsibility, but it’s also possessed by chaos and mischief and humor and violence – Collodi feels madly in love with Pinocchio, even as he constructs a story intent on teaching him to be less Pinocchio-like. The world would be a shabbier, more mundane place without the wildness that Pinocchio brought into it. If you let this story into your life, it will work some strange magic on you in the background areas of your mind. Caveat emptor.
BD: Are there any other Beehive Books titles that you would like to highlight from this year’s recent or upcoming releases?
JO: Our next big project is an edition of Le Fanu’s Carmilla, the original vampire novel, illustrated by Rosemary Valero O’Connell. We’re also working on finally wrapping up our long-delayed DRACULA: The Evidence, which is a box set presenting the original text of Dracula as a series of documents including handwritten letters, newspaper clippings, maps, train tickets, dossiers, and a vinyl audio record. That’s a project that’s tormented us for most of a decade, and we hope to have it out next year. We’re also working on an expanded version Kevin Jay Stanton’s beautiful tarot deck about the language of flowers, BOTANICA.
BD: Lastly, what would you like to tell readers who want to learn more about Beehive Books and Pinocchio: The Illuminated Edition?
JO: I highly recommend that they proceed without delay to www.beehivebooks.com or their favorite independent bookstore and place an order for this book, or one of our other rare and singular volumes.
