The Author’s Edition

When my novel Swell was published, I waited anxiously for copies to arrive. I was due in Oakland, California, to be the distributor Ingram’s featured author at the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Conference. A couple hundred of copies of the book waited for me there, and I think I signed them all. It was great, and I still have the pen. But before that I was out here in the sticks in rural Massachusetts without a mailbox and with a dirt driveway that the UPS driver refuses to travel.

The day before I left for California, I got a flash — I don’t know how to describe it. The gods spoke to me, maybe. Some dogs wait all day just to bark at the UPS guy. Maybe I’d learned their trick. At any rate, all of a sudden, I somehow intuited that I needed to be at the post office. I raced over. There it was, the brown truck parked in front of the PO. And inside, there was the driver talking with Charlie, the postmaster, a box on the counter between them. “That for me?” I asked. Indeed, it was. They were discussing whether to return the box to the regional office. Charlie’s a great guy. He indulges me. He saves wheat pennies for me. When I want stamps, he shows them in order of presumed preference. I bought out his stock of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Allen Poe, and Johnny Cash stamps. So I gave him a copy of the book, fresh from the box. The next one I took out became my own copy.

That copy is the very same one I’ve carried around to readings ever since. At airport security, I was asked why I was going to California. When she asked what I’d written, I presented her with the book: “This!” When I got back home, I carried the thing out into the woods with me on the off chance I met a friend who wanted to hear my news (I did not).

I once left it behind when I read at the Somerville Armory, outside of Boston, where I was accompanied by the horn player Dana Colley, who used to play in one of Boston’s greatest bands, Morphine. During the reading, he played baritone clarinet and hand instruments on a tape loop and, well, somehow it all worked out to being one of the coolest readings I’ve ever done. My brother in law went to pick the book up after work the next day, but the people at the Armory had graciously mailed it back to me, already.

I was sentimental about that copy, and it also had lots of notes in it. But really, it was a mark of my cognitive dissonance. In spite of the utterly obvious fact that there are many copies of this book, I still couldn’t quite convince myself that readers weren’t passing around a single copy, sequentially. My copy was the book.

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The Lexicographer’s Edition

This is an exciting copy of Swell. It was a gift from Emily, who’s a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster. She read this book more closely than me, than its editors. Every single page is marked up with notes and symbols. Her notes are of a different sort than I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty of marked-up manuscripts, including Swell, of course. Emily was marking the book for instances of particular word usage that seemed especially indicative or unusual to her. I think she even does this work while walking on a treadmill.

Virtually every page is marked. Here on the spread of pages 272 and 273, she’s marked umwelt, slaked, flume, spew hole, free rangers, grabbier, leviathans, chuck, landsmen, and hag ride.

I’d love to see a list of all the words she’s marked. It’s thrilling because these words might make it into the dictionary in the next edition. Part of her job is to collect examples of usage that the publisher stores in order to make informed decisions about how Americans are using these words. Some of them will show up in the next edition of the dictionary. Now that would be cool, Swell in the dictionary. Granted, about 97% of the words in Swell are already in the dictionary, but think of the historicity (first used in 1880, according to M-W) of it!

There’s another reason this book is so important to me. It was the first time I could conceive of what reading the book might be like. I can’t read my own book. My eyes start at the top of the page and my mind just fills in the rest of it — I don’t even really see the words. I can’t help but have regrets and look for errors. When I first got copies of Swell, I was delighted and confounded by the physicality of the books. I tried then to read a copy of it, but the act of writing it was too apparent to me. I was very curious to have a sense of what it was like to read the thing. Not just how it will be received critically, but what’s it like to fall asleep and wake up next to it? What’s it “taste” like? I must read twenty to a hundred pages of whatever every day; at this very moment, not counting Swells large and tiny, there are five books I’m reading within touching distance — how would reading Swell be like that?

Emily’s edition had the marks of a reader all over it. I could track her reading the way I can track a coyote’s walk across a snowy field. This gave me enough distance, enough of a sense of another person’s possession of the book, to finally get an idea of what it might be like to pluck the book from a shelf and read it.

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The Miniaturist’s Edition

Another favorite copy of Swell is tiny and sublime. My friend Grace made several of these for me. These copies are the size of my thumbnail and are hardbound with dust jackets and contains a map of the island the story is set on, and actual, legible (for ants, anyway) text — the whole first chapter, I think.

This book is too small, which makes it both beautiful and frightening. I can’t look at it without having my entire sense of my place in the world shaken. It’s charming, of course, but it’s disturbing, too. If this book I know so well can be this actually infinitesimal, how big am I? They were physically jarring when I first saw them — I just couldn’t understand them; they made me stumble and squint.

I gave a copy to one of the book’s publishers when I went to stay at his place in Seattle for the book launch party. It was great moment because Aaron had a surprise for me too. In his living room was a giant door-sized poster of the book’s cover mounted on foam core. I had planned to give him his mini-Swell later, but this was as auspicious as moments get. The tiny Swell fit within the whale’s eyeball — within its pupil, even — on the poster.

Some years ago, I fully imagined what it would be like to stuff wasabi-covered roasted peas up my nostrils. I don’t ever want to do this; I have no intention of doing this; I am certain it would feel awful. But now, I can hardly look at them in the market, and I haven’t even touched one since. The dreadful act lures me.

This, not the vertigo the miniature induces, is what really concerns me about the tiny Swells. I’m pretty sure I’m going to swallow one. Again — I don’t want to, and I’m not even curious about the taste. It’s just that it seems like it’s waiting to happen.