DRACULA: THE EVIDENCE Hardcover Edition

The Year of the Demon
about 4 years ago – Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 09:36:05 PM

Dearest Dracolytes,

We'd like to wish you all a 2022 that beats the odds. 

Here's to a new year full, like Stoker's book, of deep friendships, unearthly powers and mad thrusts at immortality.

Back here in our laboratory, things proceed apace -- though perhaps not the pace we would like. Still, we keep edging closer, and the picture becomes clearer.

With the turn of the calendar, our focus and commitment have only grown. We can feel it in our bones -- we've entered the year of the demon.

Despite everything, we still believe we will be able to deliver this project in the year of our lord 2022. Knock on Omicron. 

Some elements of whether this will be possible are not entirely in our hands -- but we're doing everything in our power to make it happen.

In the meantime, we're still polishing the gem of Stoker's text, and discovering gleaming new facets every day. It doesn't matter how many times we read Dracula -- dozens? hundreds now? -- every time we discover something strange and new. (Extraordinarily mild spoilers regarding the presentation of our project to follow.)

One of the interesting tensions of a project like this is how often our desire for authenticity comes into conflict with our hope to make a version of the text that's at least somewhat accessible and usable. We've mentioned before how we try to hew extremely close to the mandates of the text in these circumstances -- but sometimes compromises are necessary. If we were to produce a wax cylinder containing Dr. Seward's audio notes, this would be truly authentic and accurate to the narrative. But virtually no one would be able to listen to it -- so, in one of our few tactical compromises to accessibility, we're producing records instead. (Vinyl production has been so badly impacted by the supply chain issues that we're wondering if a wax cylinder may have been more feasible, at this point, but never mind that.)

One thing which we didn't fully grasp until we were diving into the nitty gritty of this project is how little of the text of Dracula is actually in written standard English. Two of the major narrative pieces -- the journals of Jonathan and Mina Harker -- are intended to be written in shorthand. The log of the Demeter, probably the most thrilling section of the book besides the early chapters of Jonathan's journal, is translated from written in Russian, as we discussed in a recent update.

We've followed these directives, as they're key to the storytelling of Dracula. But we've tried to find ways to make these objects useful and interactive for an audience that mainly doesn't read 19th century Russian calligraphy or Pitman shorthand. For instance, we've noticed that the text doesn't claim anywhere that Jonathan and Mina write exclusively in shorthand. So we've carefully pieced through the text and decided which sections might be written in which style.

For Jonathan, we've had him write his entire travel journal in Pitman, and then switch to longhand when he's back home at his desk in London. This way, we maintain the beauty, mystery and verisimilitude of his shorthand journal, while giving readers an ability to read and experience the narrative of the latter parts of his journals through primary source reading.

For Mina, we've had her switch back and forth between shorthand and longhand throughout her diary. We've used it to enhance character building and storytelling. She's using the journal as an opportunity to learn and practice shorthand -- so which sections does she feel most urgent about, and might she scrawl down in her natural hand without translating into her shaky shorthand? Which sections might she feel private about, and want written in an alphabet that someone who comes upon her diary might not understand?

And then we have Mina's typescript, which transcribes every word of every document contained therein, and more. This allows readers to work with the two documents side-by-side, decoding shorthand or Russian with the help of the typescript.

We play along this tension throughout the project. We've embedded moments when meaning is obscured, when records crackle or handwriting is smudged or text is worn away, to calibrate the interactivity of the reader's experience as carefully as we can. What we're after here is ergodic literature -- a text that requires the active engagement of the reader. When you're forced to look closer, you might discover something new. 

We think we've found the perfect readership for such a challenge.

Here's a very interesting (if somewhat academic) essay that's influenced by thinking about the technology of communication and narrative in this project. PHONOGRAPH, SHORTHAND, TYPEWRITER:

High Performance Technologies in Bram Stoker's DRACULA by Leanne Page is a fascinating read, if you are a particular type of nerd. (I don't think it's live online but here's a PDF download link: https://www.victoriannetwork.org/index.php/vn/article/view/27/30)

While I'm reccomending stuff, one more note for Drac-fans -- you might want to check out Alberto Breccia's DRACULA, recently re-issued in a nice edition from Fantagraphics. A gorgeously illustrated satirical take on the the Count's final days. 

Thank you for listening to me ramble! I'm trying to walk a thin line of bringing you all with us on our process without giving too much away in the way of sneak peeks and samples.

A special reward for anyone who's made it this far: 20% off any item we currently have in stock on our Beehive webstore. Use code SUPPLYCHAIN at beehivebooks.com to get the discount. It's the biggest discount we've ever offered, and it's not available to the general public -- only backers of our supply-chain-afflicted delayed campaigns.

We appreciate you all, your incredible patience and passion, the remarkable energy you've brought to this project. It's a long and winding road through a dark wood -- but we couldn't ask for better companions on the journey.

Yours,

Josh, Paul and the Beehive Team

The Magic is Darkest Just Before the Dawn
over 4 years ago – Sat, Oct 30, 2021 at 01:44:01 AM

Demonic dears,

The Hallows are upon is now. I sit and write this on the eve's eve of the Eve (AKA Friday), as a half-raining autumn gail snarls stern warnings against the windowpanes. You can feel the ghosts awakening. It's the most wonderful time of the year.

Here are our headquarters, we've been working deep into the night, brewing our potions and testing our mettle. As always, this project finds new ways to challenge us, vex us, excite us and enrich us.

I'll get into the details below of some of the areas where these challenges are engaging, rewarding and fascinating -- but there are also the areas where they're only frustrating, and I'll start with those. Bad news first.

An update on the schedule: we're still quite a ways away from being able to ship this project. At this point, we predict another year until it will be in your hands.  There are a number of reasons for this, which I'll outline.

In our last update, we explained some details about an issue I'm sure you've all been hearing about lately -- the sudden and seemingly total breakdown of all global supply chains. Many of you have likely seen the viral photos of the boats stuck outside the port of Los Angeles, an image that's indicative of something that's happening in every corner of this cornerless globe. Materials are in unimaginably short supply; there is not enough person-power to keep up with the demand at the supply, manufacturing and shipping levels; there are not enough freight containers existing in the world for the amount of shipping required; every customs point and access point is bottlenecked with a backlog of goods, trying to squeeze like a camel through the eye of a needle.

The biggest issue issue for us is the variety of high-end papers we're using for this project. Many of them are just not available right now. For some we're told that they'll be back in stock next year -- for others we're seeking replacement stocks. 

Another huge issue is vinyl manufacturing. Vinyl sales have been increasing exponentially in recent years, and they exploded during COVID. This has led to massive delays at vinyl plants -- there's just not enough production capacity in the world right now to meet the demand for records. So a turn-around time for vinyl production, which is usually around 10 weeks, is now up to nine months or more. (Here's an article on the crazy ripple effect this is having on the indie music scene. We share our current office space with the storied independent label Don Giovanni Records, so we've been hearing about these issues a lot.)

Plus: the cost of everything is just out of control right now. Materials, labor, shipping, production -- these things have all spiked from 140% to 500%. (Seriously -- shipping is 500% of its usual cost right now.) The experts mostly seem to tell us that we're past the worst of the pricing and supply crisis, and that things will stabilize sometime next year. But where they will stabilize is not yet clear.  So we have a bunch of question marks in our budget right now, as we wait for prices to settle and determine what the wisest use of our funds are.

In any case -- we seem to have picked the absolute worst time to do a project like this, and it's set us back by quite a bit. But please trust that we're making every decision in the interest of creating an unparalleled Dracula experience on the most timely schedule we can muster. We refuse to compromise quality, but we also won't leave you waiting indefinitely. We're moving towards the finish line, every single day.

And then there are the literary and creative challenges, which are the ones we signed on for, here -- wending our way through these dark woods is half the fun. There are too many of these riddles to lay them all out here, but I'll give you an example.

The captain's log of the Demeter has presented a fascinating series of challenges. The fact that it's written in Russian, and then translated for publication in the Dailygraph, meant we had to find a Russian-speaking calligrapher.  We tracked down a very talented woman named Arina Polishchuk, living in Moscow. 

We needed the Russian text of the captain's section in Russian, so we sourced a translation.

Simple enough. But of course: the captain was writing this in the 1890s. The Cyrillic alphabet was modernized in the 1920s, with characters added and removed. So we needed this section of text first translated into 19th century Cyrillic.

This is no small task, as most modern Russian speakers are not familiar with the pre-modernization alphabet. But with Arina's help we found a linguist in St. Petersburg who is expert in these matters, and had him rewrite the text for us, before handing it back to Arina to inscribe.

Those pages are right now en route from Moscow to Philadelphia, where we intend to scan them and then soak them in saltwater, to test replicating the ink-seepage that would result from being immersed in the ocean.

Authenticity at any cost.

This is how virtually every stage of the process seems to go -- something that seems initially to be a simple three-step process suddenly explodes exponentially, each step spawning five new substeps. 

But the only reason this happens is that we refuse to compromise on the verisimilitude of this creation. We want it immerse you in the world of Dracula. And much like Stoker, who obsessively figured out even the smallest, seemingly insignificant details of his world, we know a dark secret: the Demon is in the details.

We're incredible grateful for your patience with our extended timeline. You all put a lot of faith and a lot of funding behind this project, and we are more committed than ever to honoring that.

In thanks for your patience with all the delays we've been facing, we also want to give you exclusive early access to our upcoming holiday sale: 17% off all currently published Beehive titles. (This doesn't include forthcoming titles, like these three Illuminated Editions.)  Just enter HOLIDAY21 at beehivebooks.com to get the discount. If you'd like the bundle your order with the Illuminated Editions shipment to save on shipping fees, just email us at [email protected] and we'll get you set up there.

We hope you all have a Samhain full of the exact amount of terror you desire. Stay tuned for more updates as we move forward. 

Love and nightmares,

-Bees

Telegrams, Engravings, and Inventing the Universe
over 4 years ago – Fri, Aug 27, 2021 at 06:29:40 PM

Dearest Dracularians,

You've all been so patient with us, waiting with generous eagerness as we slowly unwind the black thread of this mysterious and puzzling project.

We're getting closer everyday. Like Jonathan Harker during his attempted escape from Castle Dracula, we've been foiled and frustrated and many a turn -- but unlike our friend Jon, we do not despair.

The silver lining of these compounding delays (which the ongoing nightmare of the delta variant is now exacerbating) is that we have some extra time to focus in on every little gnarled knot and cursed detail of this project.

Lately we've been obsessing about telegrams.

In Dracula, there are telegrams delivered to and from a number of countries -- England, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, etc. So we sourced authentic 1890s telegrams from all these places, and developed a variety of handwriting styles for all the clerks working in the respective telegram offices.

Nearly half of the telegrams in the book are delivered somewhere in London, which at first seemed simple. But many of the telegrams we sourced included notes saying which telegram office they were received at -- and London would obviously have many telegram offices.

So we have to answer -- where are the characters when they are sending and receiving the telegrams? At the Godalming estate in Surrey? At the Harker home or Jonathan's workplace in Exeter? At the asylum in Purfleet?

Often this answer is clear, but sometimes there's a lot to invent. Where was Quincey Morris staying in London? Where does Van Helsing stay in Amsterdam? Is he receiving these telegrams at home, or in his office? What is the handwriting style of the various clerks at the different telegram offices throughout London? What are their names? (The telegrams are initialed by the clerks.)

When in doubt, go deeper. We're now fully down the rabbit hole in Dracula locations, attempting to make rough chronological maps of the characters' transit throughout the book as they ping-pong from Whitby to London to Varna to Amsterdam to the horseshoe of the Carpathian mountains, where hell awaits. We've spent a lot of time wandering Europe on Google street view, selecting neighborhoods and houses for our characters like haunted literary real estate agents. We have Dacre Stoker using his expertise to source some addresses for us, including some small subtle Easter eggs about the locations relevant to Bram's life. We've also made good use of this interesting scholarly essay by Gill Davies, exploring the meanings of places and directions in Dracula.

Carl Sagan wrote, "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." That's what this process feels like sometimes. In order for all the details that emerge to cohere into a holistic world, we have to cook up an entire living (and unliving) world of Dracula. Thankfully, Bram Stoker was scrupulous, laying in every provision and ingredient we could possibly need. We don't need to invent the universe -- we just need to mix it up and bake it.

I could ramble on forever about the many thrilling challenges we face, and the strategies we're using to face them. Right now we're auditioning Russian calligraphers to play the part of the captain of the dommed Demeter, and assembling a ghoulish collection of Victorian death portraits to use as the basis for poor Lucy's funeral card.

But I'll save some for next time, and let you all get back to your normal human lives in which you do things other than sniff endlessly through the pages of Victorian fiction.

TLDR: We're still way behind schedule with no clear end in sight, and waiting out a lot of global logistics issues that are thoroughly out of our control -- but in the meantime we're moving along, and remain eager to get this done as soon as possible. We're so grateful for your patience.

I can't let you go without sharing an image. We just got the first engraving samples from our printer, and they look fabulous. This is a sample test proof of the engraving on the lid of the IMMORTAL EDITION.

Thank you, everyone. Love you deathlessly.

The Beehive Team

Diving Into the Demeter (and delays, delays, delays)
almost 5 years ago – Wed, Jun 30, 2021 at 10:23:09 AM

Fine ferocious friends,

We're deep in the long march now. Our little wagon is still slowly wending its way through the darkness towards the castle, and our sense of what awaits us at the destination of this strange journey fills us with hope and terror.

We've made tremendous progress towards getting ready to take this gloriously cursed project to print. We're wrapping up the calligraphy phase of the project, wrapping up the voice acting and audio assets and moving to the mixing/editing phase, and finalizing all of our research and sourcing on things like maps, logs, tickets, telegrams, letters, paper. Our sourcing is as thorough as possible in the search for ultimate authenticity. Here, for instance,  is our meticulous recreation of a Bulgarian 19th century telegram.

I'll get into more fun details of the research below. It's been a genuine joy for us, as well as a huge headache. But first, a schedule update.

Unfortunately, we've had a lot of delays all over the place. Beyond the fact that the basic nature of the project is substantially larger and more complex than we had initially anticipated, international printing and shipping has unexpectedly become a true nightmare. Our expectation was that things would speed up and ease as we started to turn the corner on the pandemic. But in fact the opposite has happened. A lot of presses put projects on hold last year due to the pandemic, so printers all over the world are seeing an unprecedented glut of business right now as all these books get rushed to press. This has led to a spike in prices for paper, printing and shipping, as well as more challenges in scheduling our books on our production partners' presses. The lead time has gone from a usual three months to as much as nine months! And our (extraordinary, terrifyingly high) printing cost has suddenly increased by nearly $50,000. We now understand why Dracula was hoarding all that treasure on St. George's Night.

Combine that with a lot of the delays and spiraling workflow that's happened on our end, and we're unfortunately probably looking at a fulfillment process going well into 2022.

But we still plan to stay as close to the delivery deadline as possible. We can't skimp on making this thing the strangest, most magnetic and compelling literary artifact that it can possible be -- and that's just taking a lot longer than we thought. 

We'll be sure to keep you in the loop about how the timeline develops.

Now -- the fun stuff! OBSESSIVELY READING AND THINKING ABOUT DRACULA. Some spoilers!

We're doing everything in our power to make this as true to life as (in)humanly possible. I have an index card tacked above my desk saying simply: "VERISIMILITUDE!!!" We've sourced 19th century telegrams from four different countries; captain's logs from dozens of different ships; floor plans and architectural schematics of creepy old British estates; maps of England and Romania; period letters; stamps; cheques, and on and on and on... (And on. And on.)

One thing we've been really diving into recently is fateful tale the shipwrecked Demeter, which carries Dracula and its doomed crew from Varna to Whitby. Paul and his team at Headcase did a deep treasure dive into ship's logs of the 18th and 19th century and turned up some remarkable stuff. Here are a few of our faves.

As for myself, I spent a recent stormy afternoon in our Beehive HQ charting the journey of the ship so we can fill in the relevant info on the log relating to position, wind direction, speed in knots, course, weather, etc. As always, Stoker gives you everything you need to jump in and go deeper into his text than any neurotypical human would ever want to. The text points out enough landmarks that you can trace their exact route, figure out realistic speeds, etc. The text is reported to be taken verbatim, "simply omitting technical details of seamanship." Well, there's plenty in there to work backwards and figure those technical details out for yourself!

 The above map will not actually feature anywhere in this book -- we just had to make it to derive other secondary attributes of the log from it.

There's really no other experience we've ever had that's comparable to immersing in a text on this level. Every time we turn another section of it around for the dozenth time, countless new facets and questions seem to reveal themselves

Here's one particular riddle we're still struggling with -- we'd love to hear what you all think.

While Jonathan is held prisoner in Castle Dracula, Dracula forces him to write three letters to Mina, post-dated individually on June 12th, 19th and 29th. These letters are central to the plot of the first section of the book. Dracula goes so far as to dress in Jonathan's clothes to mail the third letter so it is postmarked from Bistritz.

For some reason, Mina never receives any of these letters. By the time she receives the note from Sister Agatha in August, she believes Jonathan is dead -- she's had no word since May.

What happened to the letters? Simply lost in the mail? For an obsessive like Stoker, it seems odd to totally drop a major plot thread like this. Yet another intriguing rabbit hole.

We'd love to hear your theories in the comments! If we like them we may somehow incorporate them into the final product.

OK -- I've rambled long enough here. Time to get back to the black magic at hand.

Thank you all for your incredible support and passion. If there's a finer coven of immortal demons out there, we've never been bound by one. 

Eternally yours,

Josh, Paul and the Beehive Team

Production Schedule Update (w/ sneak peek at the Dailygraph clipping!)
almost 5 years ago – Tue, Apr 27, 2021 at 02:59:46 AM

Dearest Dracularians,

As Spring struggles to bring Philadelphia back from the long slow undeath of this brutal winter, we're watching our demonic flowers slowly begin to bud. DRACULA: The Evidence is moving along, closer to completion every day, with new art assets, test printings, manufacturing proofs, voice acting takes, and more.

Unfortunately, things are moving along much more slowly than we'd like them to. If I'm being honest, I have to admit that we really underestimated both the scale of this project, and the time-cost of our own obsessive perfectionism. We are hell-bent on getting every element of this project engineered seamlessly to exist both as a believable artifact of the Dracula narrative, and a readable and interactive experience. In retrospect, we might have guessed that it would take longer than we expected to nail it on the level that we hope to nail it.

I'll go into more detail below for anyone interested --  but the long and short if it is that it's looking unlikely that we're going to hit our estimated fulfillment date of October 2021. Right now our timeline says that we can be finished by the end of this year.

For anyone interested in nitty-gritty production details, I'll give an example of one of the many speedbumps we've hit along the way here. In our conception of Mina's diary, it's written in a combination of longhand and shorthand, as Mina practices her transcription skills so she can help Jonathan with his work, but also sometimes wants to get an urgent entry down without translating the symbols. So we've cast two wonderful collaborators to share the role of Mina -- Beth Lee, an outstanding calligrapher, and Anmol Pandita, one of the world's vanishingly few experts in Pitman shorthand. In our conception, Mina begins the journal in pencil, as she's not yet confident in her shorthand abilities, but then moves to a quill pen as her skills develop, and the story shifts from Whitby to London where she would likely have easier access to more various writing supplies. (This also reflects Mina's growing confidence as she becomes the de facto leader of the group fighting Dracula -- wherever possible, we've tried to embed subtle character arcs and narrative textures into our production choices, materials and art assets.)

We got past Mina's  diary entry of September 22nd, where the story shifts to London, and we had Anmol and Beth switch to pen. And though we had them both using calligraphic dip pens, we found that the line and inkflow didn't match. They didn't feel that they were written by the same person, and the shorthand line felt too clean and modern for an authentic Victorian look. So we entered a long process of figuring out how to get Anmol a pen nib that would match the look of Beth's. This was doubly difficult, because Anmol is in a somewhat remote area of India where it's not easy to order certain products online. After a lot of experimenting, we finally had Beth mail her own pen nibs to Anmol in Jammu & Kashmir. 

The problem is now solved, and they're both back to work telling Mina's story with their hands -- but this small issue had Mina's diary, a vital artifacts among the several hundred objects we're producing, at a standstill for over a month.

That's just one single point of light amidst our constellation of headaches as we move steadily towards completing this thing. But I think it exemplifies the fact that many of our slowdowns are, though arguably self-imposed, a result of our desire to create something immeasurably rich in its experiential textures, that does justice to Stoker's remarkable novel.

We've also been hard at work on the various newspaper clippings. To maximize the sense of verisimilitude, we're sourcing real articles and designs from the Pall Mall Gazette, the Westminster Gazette and the London Daily Telegraph from the actual dates listed in the book, to run alongside Stoker's text. (The paper in the text is called the "Dailygraph," but as no such paper exists we're assuming this was a fictionalized version of the Daily Telegraph.) One of the papers had an actual story about ghost sightings in London on the relevant front page!

I'll give some more details about this fascinating research process in subsequent updates. I'm still trying to resist the urge to share too many sneak peeks -- but I can't resist sharing one of the WIP clippings with you. This one is specified in Stoker's text to be pasted into Mina's diary, alongside the beautiful calligraphy and shorthand symbols by Bath and Anmol. This is not final, but we're pleased with how it's coming along. 

This will be printed on yellowed newsprint, with the ragged clipped edges seen above. The back will of course also also be printed with relevant articles from the dates listed, for anyone who wants to peel it out of Mina's diary to examine separately.

I'm sorry to bear bad news regarding the schedule and our continued delays, but I hope it's clear that it's all in service of the best possible production. You've all been such a beautiful, passionate and supportive community, and we're endlessly grateful for your patience and enthusiasm.  We're so honored to share this strange journey with you all.

Love to you each, from the very bottom of our coal-black hearts,

The Beehive Team