chris Mclaren has posted seven photos of his recently obtained copy of the 'Painfully Limited' edition of From Hell and it's pleasing to see it again. This was the neatest trick I ever pulled off in my seven years as a self publisher.


The biggest problem I had when I came to publish From Hell was that I no longer had most of the art. I had sensibly presumed that the previous publisher, Kitchen Sink Press (KSP), would have known the value of the thing and looked after such matters. So I had been steadily selling off the art originals, but I didn't anticipate that the publisher and I would fall out. I was able to negotiate the rights back based on the fact that we were owed fifteen thousand dollars that wasn't forthcoming. Then the person who had wound up holding a lot of the physical materials after the collapse of the company was trying to SELL me the From Hell negatives. This was wrong in so many ways, so I set about reconstituting the entire book from the equal mix of available art plus the full size high quality xeroxes that I always took care to salt away before sending in each chapter. In fact we finished up with a better looking set of pages. The two chapters rendered with a lot of crayon and charcoal came out much better than in the KSP printings. But there remained the problem of what I was to send our foreign clients to reproduce from. The master pages, half art and half xerox and with a couple of weeks of cleaning and reworking, were too valuable to ever let out of my sight again. The solution I arrived at was to ask Graphitti Designs to overprint thirty copies for me when they made the signed and numbered limited hardcover, and to leave these unbound as bundles of loose pages. I would then send a couple of sets to each of my foreign licensees. This was a far from perfect process, but the From Hell art was all drawn before digital scanning was the norm. After a while it looked like that market had dried up and I took a notion to have the remaining nineteen copies bound and then sell them. When I first collected From Hell in one book it was an enormous undertaking and I went at it very cautiously. The five printings of the softcover under my own imprint were all made on the cheapest possible materials. I have occasionally regretted that, but the initial orders from Diamond Distribution were so low, less than six thousand of a book that would go on to sell over two hundred thousand (and rising) copies worldwide, that caution was only sensible. When I decided to bind these leftovers I thought that for once I should make a 'beautiful book,' an object lavish in every possible way. The binding job cost around $110 per unit. The binding is plush kangaroo leather, with the logo embossed in blood red; the book is placed snugly inside a black hard shell box, also embossed with the logo in red. Then I painted a different little image inside each copy. I offered it for either 300 or 350 bucks on the front page of the old Eddie Campbell Comics website and the whole lot sold out in less than a week.

Publishing books was an interesting adventure, but I don't think I could go through it all again.
Here's an earlier post about a whole different set of problems that arose when our printer went bankrupt in 2005.
Top shelf's subsequent second printing was essentially a new edition, being the first digital version of the work, and sporting a new painted cover.
Topshelf's Fourth printing now in stock. (ninth printing in all counting my five) And note that the production values of their editions are higher than those of mine.
And strictly for the anally retentive, I wrote out my notes on all the various editions up to the end of 2001 on the old website