DRACULA: THE EVIDENCE Hardcover Edition

"Hell has its price."
over 3 years ago – Wed, Sep 14, 2022 at 10:10:56 PM

Hello everyone,

The summer winds to a close, and the tides begin to turn. We're starting to see some positive signs that the supply chain constrictions may be loosening. Shipping costs, while still staggeringly high, have begun to dip slightly, and certain materials we need are beginning to restock their availability. Still too soon to be sure of a shipping date, but we're getting there. As did our embattled heroes in London (well -- most of them), I think we're going to make it through the darkness.

I thank you, as always, for your endless patience. You've all been so kind and supportive as the wreckage of the last few years has continued to gather up around us.

I'm still hesitant to share too much of our progress with you as I fear that it will spoil some of the joy (and horror) of discovery once the editions are finally out.

But I do want to give you at least something to keep your appetites whet and your fangs sharp. Open the following link your own risk.

Here's a sneak peek (can you peek with your ears?) at the first entry of Dr. Seward's audio journal, as he ponders the strange afflictions of his troubled patient Mr. Renfield.

We're finalizing the audio now and getting ready to send them off to the vinyl plant for our first test presses. Hat tip to  our audio engineer Lauren Banjo, our dear friends at Don Giovanni Records who have helped us figure out the world of record manufacturing... and of course, the wonderful Sam Oladeinde, our Dr. John Seward.

We're still very open to thoughts regarding how much, if anything, we should share in terms of glimpses like this along the way, so feel free to weigh in below. Thus far the take-away is that we should be very sparing... that's my impulse as well, but I do want to keep you all engaged and confident that despite the delays we're continuing to push onwards.

Thank you friends. More soon.

The Bees

Moving Along!
over 3 years ago – Sat, Jul 23, 2022 at 04:30:10 AM

Hello everyone,

Just a quick note today from your friends in the tomb, as we soldier on despite the compounding challenges, 12 steps forward and 11.8 steps back. But forward momentum, nevertheless!

We're still far behind schedule and don't have an exact estimate of when books will ship, but we are getting closer every day. We hope to have clearer information for you soon. We are hearing some good but not-yet-definitive things about some of our production pipeline and supply chain issues. You've all been so wonderfully kind and patient, but we don't want to push that any further than we have to. We're working on this non-stop.

Some exciting developments, in the meantime! As I mentioned in our last update, we unexpectedly lost our wonderful calligrapher Abdullah Ozdemir, who was playing Jonathan Harker, when he was conscripted into the Turkish military. This left us scrambling for a replacement, but we were very lucky to find someone truly spectacular to fill Abdullah's sizeable calligraphic shoes.

The calligrapher and theatre artist Miriam Sachs is someone whose resume and interests seem almost custom-designed for a project like this. Whereas most of our brilliant calligraphers are charmed and intrigued by the idea of "acting" -- playing a character on the page, capturing their shifting moods, their habits, their personality quirks -- this process is at the core of Miriam's art practice. She does a lot of work creating props for film, television and theatre -- pieces meant to weave a sense of place and reality. She also has a profound expertise in recreating historical handwriting, inhabiting the persona of authors and artists from the past. Here's a segment from a German documentary in which she discusses her work recreating the handwriting of author Heinrich Von Kleist.

Abdullah had planned to take on several characters, including Jonathan Harker. Miriam will be taking on some or all of his leftover work.  

Jonathan's journal is one of the most challenging artifacts in our box set. In the opening sections, when's he's on the road in Eastern Europe, his journal is kept in Pitman shorthand. We've decided that upon his return to England, he switches to longhand -- this way, part of his journal will be readable as narrative. We found a spectacular shorthand expert in England named Tracey Jennings Harding -- who still works with shorthand professionally, as a hand-stenographer for some very very old-school executives -- and Tracey did an amazing job on the early sections. But it creates a special challenge -- how to have two people, with hand-styles as distinct as fingerprints, inhabit the same Jonathan?

Miriam may be taking on Jonathan -- and she is approaching this with such sensitivity and care, such awareness of story and character, that she's teaching us a thing or two. She's also planning to create some original drawings and sketches in character as Jonathan, with I think will help weave together the shorthand and longhand sections.

I don't want to share too much, and I'm worried that even this level of detail treads into spoiler territory. But it's one nice side effect of our long delays that we have some extra time to highlight the work of our countless brilliant collaborators. (We have had over three dozen people working on this project so far!)

I'll share more as we go along, if our readers enjoy this kind of thing. Eager to tell you about Lauren Banjo, our brilliant sound engineer helping us tell the story of Renfield in on Dr. Seward's recorded notes!

More soon friends. Thanks as always for your patience and supportive messages, and sorry again for the delays. We're getting there, I promise.

Team Dracula

Travelling On
almost 4 years ago – Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 08:20:58 PM

Greetings friends,

Things are moving along! There are still a lot of holdups in indenting certain materials, and international freight costs are still sky high, but from what I'm hearing we may see some movement there around the end of the year. 

I can't give any exact timeline yet, but I can say we're closer and gaining more clarity as we go. We certainly picked a great time to do a project this ambitious and complex, amidst shortages, inflation, and spiraling fuel and material costs. But we will not be stopped -- only slowed. We've spent the last few months working on a number of contingency plans, fallback positions and possible paths forward. We now have a full Charlie from It's Always Sunny GIF with of schemes and stratagems. I'm more confident than ever that this project will be completed in the style it deserves. It's just taking us a little (a lot) longer than we hoped.

One little behind the scenes peek. As I've mentioned before, we're working with over a dozen different calligraphers, who we cast as the different characters -- which include major ones, like Jonathan Harker's ~50k handwritten words, to minor ones, like Sister Agatha, to unnamed ones like various telegraph operators and the like. Our calligraphic cast are from all over the world -- Italy, Turkey, the US, the UK, India, and more. Working with this many folks gives a feeling of life to the project -- I really think of them as our little troupe of actors, inhabiting dozens of different characters on the page. We work closely with each of them to develop the personality of each character, and determine how that personality flows through to their handwriting. Of course, working with so many contributors also poses a lot of problems. We've had delays due to new babies, COVID complications, computer breakdowns and more -- our Turkish calligrapher has been delayed because he was conscripted into the army!

But we're pushing through, and are 95% finished with all the calligraphy. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of words of hand-written text. There's only one character we still haven't cast: Mr De Ville himself, the deathless Count. Dracula himself has almost no handwritten documents in the book. Two very short notes, one sent to Jonathan Harker care of the Golden Krone Hotel, the other left for him upon his arrival. But obviously, these two small notes are vitally important, as they're the only points in our project when the demon reaches his hand straight into our miniature world.

Before his military service, we planned have the wonderful Abdullah Ozdemir play the role of Dracula. But now we've been scrambling for a replacement. We've got a meeting set tomorrow morning with a remarkable German calligrapher who seems like a creator after our own heart -- she specializes in recreating historical handwriting, and obsesses about authentic paper, ink, format and conceptual approach. She's also a professional theatre-maker, who sees calligraphy as an extension of her storytelling practice. I won't share her name since we don't have her contracted just yet, but we're so excited to try to work with her -- she seems like a kindred soul, and a perfect piece of casting for our titular villain.

Will report back about this soon. Thank you all for your incredible patience and support. I'm sorry that I don't have more clarity about scheduling and production yet, but we are truly moving closer every day. You're all wonderful. May God have mercy on your souls.

-The Bees

"The time seemed interminable as we swept on our way..."
almost 4 years ago – Sun, May 01, 2022 at 05:17:19 AM

Hello darkness, my old friends,

We soldier on, in spite of everything.  We are getting closer every day. But the problems persist.

To our great shock and dismay, our printer informed us of yet another round if increases in the cost of paper pulp. To be honest, at this point I don't have any strong idea of what's causing it. There's been yet another round of COVID outbreaks in Shenzhen, and I'm sure the war in Europe isn't helping. Costs of transportation and labor continue to rise. But I truly would have thought that things were as bad as they could get -- my jaw literally dropped when our printers mentioned the new increases in our last meeting. I was hoping to hear the opposite.

I think the global economy is suffering through a lot of shocks, and a lot of the price increases are here to stay. But I also believe things will stabilize settle down once we're through the pandemic. (We ARE going to be done with this pandemic eventually, right...??) So we're still in a holding pattern. I believe if we hold off a little longer, out budget will stretch further and allow us to do more with this project.

Here are a couple of citations to show where things are at with the global production situation. 

• There's a great piece from Wired Magazine explores the international shipping situation, and efforts to build new tech to bring some stability to what's suddenly become a volatile industry. 
• This one's more inside baseball, but here's an article from Printweek on the latest round of paper cost increases.

Still -- we march on. We're polishing the hell out of this project, and when we finally send it off to print, it'll be in the exact style that it, and you all, deserve.

Considering the unexpected length of this wait -- and the extraordinary patience of all of you -- we've started to consider doing some drops of digital content ahead of the print edition. For instance, we could release Dr. Seward's diary in a digital format ahead of the record production. But we're also a little worried that this will spoil the effect of the final production -- we don't want the materials to be old hat by the time they arrive. We're uncertain about this -- please feel free to sound off in the comments or email us at [email protected] if you have a strong opinion about whether you'd like a drip of Dracula digital content before the production is finished. We're listening.

You all are the greatest community in the world, and we thank you for your extraordinary support. If you have any thoughts, issues or concerns, we're only an email away. And if you want any of our other publications, we're offering our biggest discount ever, exclusive to our readership effected by these delays. Use code FRUSTRATION at beehivebooks.com to get 20% off everything in print.

And don't forget -- Tuesday is Dracula Day! May 3rd, the date that Jonathan Harker arrives in Transylvania and writes of queer dreams from the Golden Krone Hotel. We hope you're doing something to celebrate. We'll be spending it praying to the dark gods of the supply chain.

Bloodily yours,

The Beehive Team

Getting Closer
about 4 years ago – Tue, Mar 08, 2022 at 12:48:50 AM

Dearest, undeadest friends,

Just a quick update this time! To show too many more production previews might start to get into spoilerish territory. I want to do a better job of keeping you all in the loop as we move forward, and updating more frequently -- and doing so probably involves putting a bit less pressure on myself to have lots of cool stuff to share in every post. So, while we'll certainly be sharing teases and hints and stories as we go along, maybe expect some more matter of fact (and, hopefully, more frequent) updates.

I think (he said tentatively, knocking madly on three different varieties of wood) that we're moving past the worst of the production delays. While paper prices are currently still extremely elevated, paper availability at least seems to be starting to return to normal. From everything I've heard, this is a good omen that indicates pricing may relax soon as well.

The pricing and availability issues remain the biggest slowdown for us. We're close to completion of the design phase of the project, and could be ready to send everything off to print as soon as eight or ten weeks from now. But a project like this, which is full of a wide variety of specialty high-end paper stocks, is affected by these pricing and availability issues more than almost any other project imaginable. Even worse, a wide variety of paper stocks is essential to what we're after here. Nothing will ruin the verisimilitude of our box set like a series of prints that feel like they're on a standardized set of paper stocks, cranked off CMYK presses in bulk. The bespoke nature of each item is a huge part of what creates the reality of our set.

So we're still waiting things out and hoping pricing and availability go back to somewhere within spitting distance of where they were before. If this doesn't happen soon, we'll make some hard decisions -- which may include somewhat limiting the scope of what we're doing, cutting some items, rethinking the presentation of some others. But in the meantime, we'll be indenting speciality papers bit by bit, wherever we can, and holding out a little while longer while we try to stretch our budget as far as it'll go. We refuse to make this any less superb than we know it can be. 

So, this is all a long way of saying, things are still up in the air, but we're getting close to the point where hit print the moment we land on a strategy that makes sense. I wish I had more clear info to share, but for now you'll have to make do with our commitment to making this the absolute best project it can be, even if the wait is a bit (or quite a bit) longer than expected. 

And we'll be right here with you, huddled in the darkness, listening to the waves lap against the bow of the Czarina Catherine, for however long it takes,

Before I let you go: a salute to the 100th anniversary of the gorgeous, iconic, and morally hyper-dubious film Nosferatu, which took a bald-faced unlicensed appropriation of Stoker's classic and elevated it into a towering work of neo-Expressionist dread and thunder. As Stoker lovers, we are required to be vaguely anti-Nosferatu -- but we can't deny the endless, burbling black river of inspiration and nightmare which bend directly through it. A side-eyed tip of the cap to the artists behind it, especially concept artist and set/prop designer Albin Grau, whose remarkable visionary work we've been digging into lately.

Love and lifeblood,

Josh, Paul, and all the Vampire Bees