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Another World Record?
‘Wouldn’t it be good if Agatha Christie could break another world record?’ It was one of those mornings. Our monthly meeting to discuss sales figures and forward plans with Agatha Christie Limited is usually eventful enough, as there’s always something interesting going on, but today Mathew Prichard was in attendance and there was an air of excitement in the room.
Agatha Christie has held two world records for many years now. As the best-selling novelist of all time, having sold two billion books worldwide in over 45 languages, and as the author of the longest-running play, The Mousetrap, now in its 58th continuous year. But Agatha Christie Limited had been in touch with Guinness World Records (GWR) and had discovered that the largest page count of any book was a dictionary with 3,888 pages (although we later discovered that this was in two volumes, so wasn’t the record holder in any case). So the question was, could HarperCollins publish a single volume of around 3,900 pages and claim the world record for the thickest book? ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘We can do anything.’ Editors are trained to say things like that. Well, it was harder than it sounded.
GWR had insisted that the book had to be mass produced and made available for sale, not a one-off production, and most importantly of all be physically readable. It had to function as a book, and be one continuous binding, not an unyielding stack of paper or something that divided into separate parts. We rapidly dismissed the idea of publishing all of Agatha Christie’s books in one volume – we would have needed around 20,000 pages for that – and decided that Miss Marple, with her 12 novels and 20 short stories, would provide the perfect length for us to achieve 4,000 pages.
Over the next few weeks, we contacted a number of printers and bookbinders, both in the UK and overseas, most of whom told us that it was too big – hadn’t it occurred to us that there were good practical reasons why people didn’t produce 4,000-page books? But Cromwell Press in Wiltshire, in partnership with Cedric & Chivers Period Bookbinders, a company with 150 years of antiquarian book manufacturing under its belt, said that they would like to try, and began creating prototypes. The breakthrough was in the design of the spine: it had to be strong enough to bear the weight of almost 8kg of paper while flexible enough to allow the book to open so that every page could be read. The solution was in a completely flexible hand-sewn and leather arrangement that opened like a concertina – it was like nothing we had expected, but utterly perfect for the job.
The unveiling of the first working prototype was an auspicious occasion. After four months, I think even Mathew had given up on us ever finding a solution, but we revealed the book and he marveled over the ingenuity of it. Made up of 252 hand-sewn sections (called signatures) of 16 pages each, the book had ended just over a foot thick, and one of the biggest challenges had been to find a guillotine large enough to trim the pages. But the prototype gave us all the confidence to go ahead with our record attempt, and at the end of 2008, we ordered 500 copies.
Knowing that the book had to be special, we had already been working on what would go inside. We approached Kate Mosse, author of the bestselling Labyrinth and a self-confessed Miss Marple fan, to write an introduction, and we commissioned a full-color map of St Mary Mead from artist Nicolette Caven, to be based on Agatha Christie’s own drawing of the village from A Murder at the Vicarage. PolmacUK, who manufacture beautiful wooden boxes, were commissioned to produce suede-lined cases for the book, as we knew we needed something both elegant and robust after the handle had fallen off an earlier attempt to make a leather box!
In more than ten years of publishing Agatha Christie, I don’t believe that I have ever seen so much time and effort go into producing one book (albeit 500 copies). But The Complete Miss Marple is not just a book. It’s not even just a world record. For the people working on it, it has become a labor of love, a chance to wind back the clock and revisit some of the forgotten arts of publishing. The end result is both a technical achievement and a thing of beauty. It is also very British – clever, solid, functional, and faintly absurd. We hope that Agatha Christie would have approved.
David Brawn
Publishing Director HarperCollins
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To purchase one of the limited editions, retailing at £1000, please call: 0844 576 8112 or email weborders@harpercollins.co.uk.