TitleTales

Author Interview: Neil Gaiman

British author Neil Gaiman won the Nebula Award for Best Novella for his book, Coraline (2002). That made for a total of five awards Coraline won including the Hugo, Bram Stoker, Locus, and British SF Association awards. Coraline is being re-released for a movie tie-in coming this fall. In addition, The Graveyard Book will be released September 30, 2008. Our Collection Development department had the pleasure of interviewing Neil Gaiman at the Atlanta ALA Conference in 2002 and we thought you’d enjoy reading the interview again.

BWI: You use myth a lot in what you write. How much did that influence Coraline?

NG: I don’t know that Coraline comes from myth. I think comes from something else. I mean it’s easy to look at American Gods or “Sandman” and say, “Well, we’re looking at this, and this is where I’m going. I’m building on myth, but I’m taking the structure that already existed and seeing how we can relate them to what’s going on now.”

Coraline is odd. Coraline is an odd book on an awful lot of levels. And it’s doubly odd because there’s very little that was conscious about it, in terms of the creation, which is something that can only happen when you take eleven years to write a 30,000-word book. What would happen is, I would write until I didn’t know what happened next, and then I’d stop. At some point the stopping was for about five years. But when I knew what happened next, I’d go back and write it some more, and sometimes it would lie fallow for about eight months or whenever I could get back to it. And I think it grew very, very organically—there’s very little sense that I pushed the story anywhere it wasn’t going to go.

It sort of felt, at the end of it, dreamlike in the sense that it has an inevitability that dreams have. One of the weirdest things, and it’s also one of the coolest things, that people have said to me about Coraline, on finishing it, was, that once they read it, they felt they’d always known it. Not that they felt like they’d read it before, but when they got to the end of the story it was like something they’d always known. I think that comes from whatever that same source is. So no, if there’s a logic to Coraline, it’s not a myth logic.

I played a little with—I enjoyed the fact that—you never know what the other mother is. She’s never explained. She’s never defined, and the way that you get from one world to another is never really explained. You get the feeling that there’s something else there other than the other mother that’s keeping everything going, and there’s something else in the corridor that’s never heard and you never find out what. What you get is that strange kind of feeling that you get in dreams.

BWI: With the other mother and the stepmother, do you think it’s more like a fairy tale?

NG: It’s certainly a fairy tale. It doesn’t have the sheer nightmare brutality of a usual fairy tale. Look at something like “Hansel and Gretel” a tale of abandonment and starvation and mass murder. It doesn’t have that level of fear and violence, but I hope it’s scary. It’s a good fairy tale.

BWI: It does build on a childhood form of fears: not having your parents or not knowing who they are.

NG: Absolutely. I don’t know about you guys, but I would occasionally worry when I was at school that I’d get home and find that my parents had moved. It never happened. They were a very reliable, normal sort of parents. But I’d wonder “what if I get home and I get to the door, and somebody else answers?” It was one of those strange little “what ifs” in the back of my head.

When I was growing up, we had a room that was kept for best, and it had a door at the end that opened up to a brick wall. I wondered what would happen if one day I opened up that brick wall. And I think in some way, it was a desire to create something.

Nobody seems to write fairy tales these days. Instead, they’ll retell classic fairy tales and do post-modernist retellings, and I’m probably more guilty of that than most people.

BWI: Or realistic fiction, which we see a lot of.

NG: Yeah. I remember once when I was a journalist doing an analysis for an article on all of the blockbuster books that came out that year. You know, things like Lace and Squiggles, and all of those. I came to the end, and they were all fairy tale books. So, yes, it is definitely a fairy tale and, also, to tip a wink to that, one of the three dead children is a fairy, although lots of people don’t notice.

BWI: I don’t know when I noticed, but I remember noticing and going “hmm.”

NG: And I never really say it, but there’s one of these girls who eats flowers and can fly.

BWI: I was fascinated yesterday when you were telling about how you designed your graphic novels. I’m grounded in children’s picture books where often the author and illustrator never meet. Would you speak a little more to that? Is that normal?

NG: It’s unusual in comics. At least, it was unusual for me in that I wouldn’t write a comic unless I knew who was drawing it. Because I learned very early on that if you’re writing for an artist then you can make them look good, and thus they can make you look very good. And if you have an idea of something you’re going for, that’s part of that vision. What’s lovely about that is there are people I’ve been working with for almost 20 years: Dave McKean, who does the cover and the interior art in Coraline and who also designed all of the “Sandman” books and did all of the cover paintings. So having someone like that that I know I can trust implicitly. We’ve done children’s picture books together; we’ve done more or less everything together now and just sort of enjoyed doing it.

BWI: How long into the process before he gets in on it?

NG: It depends very much on what the project is—when the artist gets in on it. Sometimes it can be you and the artist sitting and talking about what you want to do before you go off and write it. With the new “Sandman” book I’m doing, Endless Nights—it’s seven short stories, and I wanted to know who each of my seven artists was before I wrote the short stories. So that I could go, “Okay, here is how I want so and so to look.” There has to be for me the element of excitement.

BWI: Why did you decide to do another “Sandman” title at this point, and when will the book be published?

NG: There’ll be a hard back coming out, probably next February. Vertigo Books will be ten years old next year. So for the 10th anniversary, we want to kick it off right, assuming that we’re not too late.

BWI: You’ve made a pretty dramatic shift from doing the graphic novels and comic books to writing mainstream novels. Well, not exactly mainstream, but science fiction and fantasy fiction writing. What inspired that?

NG: I suppose that the biggest influence was that after 10 years of writing comics, I felt like I was getting quite good at it. And, I felt like there was an awful lot still to learn in prose. I’d won every comics award that it was possible to win when I was writing. I won several awards it was impossible to win for what I was writing! And, I wanted to keep learning my craft. I’d co-written one novel at that point (Good Omens with Terry Patchett), but I needed to figure out how this whole novel thing worked, and I wanted to write film scripts. I wanted to learn; there are things I don’t know how to do.

One of reasons why I’m happy to do a little comedy stuff is because, okay, we’re now five years on from my shift to novels. I’ve now won the Mythopoeic Award, the Julia Valonga award, the Bram Stoker award for best novel. I’m nominated for a Hugo award. I’m in the running for a number of major awards for American Gods. So okay, I think I’m getting the idea on the prose stuff, and Coraline seems to be going off and making friends everywhere on a level that I’d never seen anything else of mine do. I’ve had books that were best sellers and books that were critically, hugely well-received and still not had anything like the effect that Coraline had. I go out there and people say, “My god, you wrote Coraline.” And I go, “Yes” and they say, “Oh my gosh!”

As I was saying earlier, with the whole Coraline thing, the weirdest thing about it to me is that I kind of feel about it like I feel about my children. I was there at their conception. I’ve been involved on a day-to-day basis in bringing them up. And, I still look at them and wonder. The children that I raised are studying computer science at George Washington University. How did they get there? How did that happen? And Coraline has that type of effect on me. And I think, well, I was there through the 11 years of your growing up, and now you’re out in the world making friends and people are falling in love with you. How did that happen? That’s so cool. I know I couldn’t do it again if you put a gun to my head. Not that I will never write another children’s book, but I’ll don’t think I’ll ever write anything that will quite do what Coraline does. Or if I did, I’d be in my mid-fifties by the time it came out.

BWI: The fact that you wrote it over eleven years and it’s so organic…

NG: There’s no sense in there that it was begun by a 31-year-old author living in England and finished by a 41-year-old author living in America.

BWI: It’s very playful all the way through. It’s got the scary things that wake you up at night, but it’s got a very playful attitude. A lot of your stuff doesn’t have that playfulness in it.

NG: Well, sometimes that’s because editors take it out.

BWI: (laughing) You wanted to play.

NG: Sometimes it’s because it’s not appropriate. American Gods—I would have loved to play more, but it wouldn’t have been right for that book. I needed to go right into the 650-page theme that needs to keep going. It doesn’t allow me to play.

BWI: Is there anything in particular that influenced your love of the creepy and the macabre? What influenced you as a child?

NG: Well, the two kind of go together, but on the whole I don’t remember… Well, the thing that inspired me on the creepy and the macabre was that at the age of five or six I was given a copy of the Penguin Charles Addams, which was an English Penguin collection of assorted Charles Addams cartoons. Not all of which I could see the humor in at the age of 6, but I would look at anyway.

BWI: His Mother Goose is being reprinted this year.

NG: Oh, good. I will tell you one of the coolest secrets in the world. If you’re ever in New York, in the New York Public Library, the one on 42nd Street with the lions, on the 3rd floor. If you follow the signs to the men’s toilet, not something many women do, you will find yourself in the shortest and coolest art gallery/museum in New York. And, it’s the Charles Addams gallery. The NY Public Library is the custodian of all the original Charles Addams things and every quarter they put up a different display of original Charles Addamses that covers the corridor on the way to the men’s toilets on the 3rd floor.

BWI: I’ll remember that because I’m a Charles Addams fan.

NG: They always have some of his New Yorker covers and some of the Mother Goose pieces. Wonderful. So, that’s definitely there in the whole, loving the creepy. I also used to like the Addams Family TV show at that age and the Munsters TV show which I took desperately seriously at that age. I used to love the artifacts of horror while not being very good at actually coping with the horror itself. I remember staying up at about the age of 11 and getting to see Son of Dracula a dreadful film that absolutely terrified me because in this movie Dracula could turn into smoke. An absolutely terrifying moment. I don’t think I got into horror fiction at all until I was 11, 12, 13, something like that and picking up things like the Pan Book of Horror Stories in England. On the other hand, most really good children’s fiction has a very, very good moment when the ice cream goes down your spine. For me, the coolest moment in the entire Narnia series, is the Island of Nightmares in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader where everything’s dark, and then the screaming begins. It’s an astonishing little moment in the middle of an otherwise fairly comfortable book.

What did I love? As a kid I loved C.S. Lewis. I loved the now completely forgotten author named Margaret Storey who wrote a series of books that were not exactly “Harry Potter,” more books of magic, I suppose. It began with a series called Timothy and the Two Witches about two kids named Timothy and Ellen and this weird sort of magical land on the other side of something which is something that’s always obsessed me. I loved Clement Freud’s book Grimble and a sequel, Grimble at Christmas. J.B.S. Haldane’s My Friend Mr. Leakey. Noel Langley, who’s only famous now as one of the three scriptwriters on the Wizard of Oz movie, who wrote a wonderful book called The Land of Green Ginger about what happens to Aladdin’s son Abu bin Ali when he sets out on a quest to get married. And I used to love the “Uncle” books by J.P. Martin. A very peculiar set of books about a giant elephant who lived in a peculiar combination of stately home and giant apartment complex and a funfair and his battles with Beaver Hateman and the Badfort crowd. Wonderful stuff that’s now completely forgotten. The stuff that still remains is C.S. Lewis, very much so, obviously.

Diana Wynne Jones wasn’t writing when I was a kid, or if she was I didn’t discover her. On the other hand, I think she’s the finest fantasy writer of the twentieth century for kids. One of the things I’m most happy about in the entire “Harry Potter” thing is that it’s brought the entirety of Dianna Wynne Jones back into print. I love Tolkien, obviously and, by the time I was in double digits, I was already a huge adult fiction fan. I love Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, R.A. Lafferty, Harlan Ellison, all those kinds of people. They were my authors. Plus, I had the good fortune to be in a school where they had no library funds. But, from about 1910 to 1930, they’d obviously had a lot of money which meant that I was in my mid 20s before I discovered that between the ages of 9 and 14 I’d had a grounding in Edwardian literature that was equal to that of an Edwardian scholar. Many people went to university and studied intensively to try to get the sort of grounding in Edwardian literature that I got because my school library had had no money past 1930. I read the entire works of G.K. Chesterton and the entire dreadful Edgar Wallace.

I read my way through with no particular regard for quality, which I think is a good thing with kids. Every now and then, I find myself biting my lip with my kids when I go, “Don’t read that—it’s crap,” but then I’ll think, “No, nothing’s crap at that age.” And not only is nothing crap at that age, but sometimes you can find genuine magic on what to anybody else might be a dung heap because it’s magic that you’re bringing to it.

There’s that horrible moment when you go back and reread a childhood classic, and sometimes you find that it’s as good as you thought it was. Sometimes it’s better than you thought it was, and sometimes you have this memory of this scene in there which meant so much to you, when the rain was coming down, and the horses were restless and they kicked the horses up and they could hear the dark lord coming over the hill. And you get to the thing, and you’re back there reading it, and it says, “What a jolly rotten night this is,“ said Peter. And you realize, “I did all the rest of it.”

It’s worth remembering with anything out there. Whatever teachers and librarians, their impulse might be to say, “Oh, don’t read that, it’s trash.” You know, bless R.L. Stine’s “Goosebumps.” He got more aggravation from that with teachers banning them and this, that, and the other. I say, they are 11 or 12, whatever they find in “Goosebumps” is wonderful, they will take it with them for the rest of their lives. It may not be there if they go back and try and find it when they’re 20, but they still have it. They never lose that.

BWI: If they find that reading is fun, they are going to read more and more.

NG: It’s not just that. That’s my initial reaction—anything that gets kids reading, that’s just great, even if it’s trash. And I’m not saying that “Goosebumps” is trash. But the flip side of that is—ours is not to say what is trash, because there are things that kids will bring to it. There’s the magic of the first time you encounter an idea. You and I could pick up an appallingly written fantasy novel obviously hacked out and just as obviously a really third-rate rip-off of “Lord of the Rings” or something and look at it and know it’s a badly hacked out rip-off. For a kid who may never have come across anything like that before, they pick it up, and it’s a doorway into another world. Some of that, it may not be there for them when they grow up. But what I’m saying is not that any reading is good reading and you’ll go on to better stuff. It’s that you can find diamonds on dung heaps at that age, and sometimes you brought the diamonds with you and you put them down there and you don’t know that.

BWI: The magic of the moment.

NG: Yep. Absolutely.

BWI: You successfully write about cultures other than your own in much of your work, is that something that you do a great deal of research for?

NG: I try to. If I’m going to write about somebody’s culture, if I’m going to write about something I don’t know about. The suspension of disbelief is a very, very fragile bubble. You’re taking somebody by the hand, you’re saying: “Hello, I like you, and I’m going to lie to you now, and it’s going to be okay. You have to trust me.” And, it’s a very strange and intimate thing. And, especially with what I do, where I’m very liable to say, “Okay, we were in the Convention Center, and everything went fine until I went off on a quest to discover the restrooms and turned the corner, and there was a very small dragon.” And, it’s okay, if you can walk with me, you can walk that far. The problem is going to be for anybody who knows the Atlanta Convention Center, and I’ve said, “we went up four or five flights of stairs,” and at that point they’ll think, “No, it’s down.”

I remember a brilliant historical novel about somebody who was transported back in time to London in the sixteenth century. He says to the first person he encounters, “Sir, where shall I find Oakland Street?” And the man says, ”Oh, it’s three blocks over that way.” And as a person from England I’m going, London has not yet mastered the concept of a city block. There was no such thing in the sixteenth century. And the entire novel just went down like a soufflé. You know, you open the oven door, and that just sank. I gainfully hung in there until the end, but it never made it back. So, in terms of writing about other cultures, the last thing I want is somebody going, “Oh, you got that completely wrong.”

On the other hand, having said all that and having done the research, there was one line that I used at the end of “Sandman,” where Shakespeare is talking to Ben Jonson. Ben Jonson says, “You know, I’m probably going to be a better writer than you because of what I’ve done: I’ve been a spy, I’ve been this, and I’ve been that, I’ve been in prison, I’ve been at the top and at the bottom, I’ve been a scholar. What have you done? How can you write about people?” And Shakespeare said, “Well, I’m a person.” And really that’s all the qualifications you need. I think that’s very true. I was at an interview a couple of months ago when someone was talking about their favorite of the short stories in American Gods. And instead of saying I love the short story of the Arab—this very nervous, sad little Arab salesman in New York, he said, “Is it autobiographical?” And I said, “Well yes, except that this is a sort of gay, sad little Arab having a miserable time in New York and I’m a heterosexual Jewish Englishman who loves New York.“ But, yes of course, you’re translating experiences and you’re taking from your store of life.

The next novel—I’m not sure what I’ll do—I have a choice of about three different novels, and each of them is fun because each of them involves going and doing a little bit of research and each of them involves characters who are very much not me. Whichever way I go on the next book, it’s going to be very interesting. One of the novels I may do is about an American romance writer moving to England, and it would actually be a sequel to Stardust in a very strange sort of way set about 150 years after the events in Stardust. But, it would be a contemporary novel with the magic very out there on the edges, almost not there at all. Or, I may write a completely different book. There’s a weird little thing that isn’t exactly a spin-off from American Gods or even inspired by American Gods, but it was a story I had in my head before I wrote American Gods, which was why some of the things in American Gods happened the way they did. It’s called The Anansi Boys, and it’s about Mr. Anansi’s sons. I may write that one next.

BWI: Do you think that moving to America has influenced your writing—the switching over of cultures?

NG: I think it influenced American Gods enormously. When I was in England writing about America, as I did every now and again, I’d either write a fairly accurate America from my point of view as I did in something like Murder Mysteries, or I’d write a kind of hallucinatory, imaginary sort of America which was built up from movies and things like that. As I would point out when people would tell me off for writing about America, “I may not be able to write an Atlanta that is as accurate as someone living in Atlanta would write, but I could probably write an Atlanta as accurate as a writer in LA or a writer in Seattle or a writer in New York who’s never been to Atlanta would write,” because England is a satellite state, we get your movies, we get your world.

Moving to America, I started to feel after a while that there was a huge swatch of America that I hadn’t read about. And that was actually one of the biggest impetuses behind American Gods, because, okay, well I want to write an American novel. I want to write all this American stuff that I’m seeing going on and that I think is so interesting and weird and cool, but Americans seem to assume is just part of the landscape and they don’t bother putting it into books. Whether it was the obvious sort of things like Rock City and the House on the Rock or whether it was the weirder American habit of parking cars out on the ice of frozen lakes and waiting for them to fall in. I wanted to try and get as much of that kind of feel as I could into the book, and I think I did. I could never have written that novel if I was living in England because I wouldn’t have had the raw materials. It would have been like trying to create an omelet without having any eggs. I needed to be here and have the eggs and go, “Hang on, I have these eggs—if I whip them together and put some stuff in and put them in a frying pan—I have an omelet.”

BWI: The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Speak to that and your role with it.

NG: Well, my role originally was just that of comics creator and somebody who had a following, a name that I could use for good. Beyond that, these days, I’m now on the board of directors, which is a whole other thing. Other industries, books have PEN, you have various civil liberties organizations, you have librarians, as librarians you have an enormous stake in freedom of speech. There’s a lot of vested interests, and a lot of battles that have been fought and won over the years that basically, have established freedom of speech pretty damned solidly for adult literature in America. Which is great. Films have huge, rich, funded lobbying organizations. Rock music, rock and pop, when things started going weird in Florida, they were able to mobilize the troops. Comics are a very small, very poor industry. It does not have a lot of money, and there are not an awful lot of troops to mobilize. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund started out as a fighting fund raised for “Friendly Frank’s Comics.” When “Friendly Frank’s Comics” got busted by an undercover cop, a guy over the age of 18, who decided to go in and buy an underground comic and bust them on community-standards charges. These things are normally to do with re-election, there’s normally something going on in the background, and the fighting fund was founded. We eventually won the case. And, we had money left over. That’s how the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund started. It is to defend legally the rights of comics creators, comics sellers, comics stores, comics publishers who are under legal attack on First Amendment grounds. This can go all the way from the Mavrides case in Canada where we had to fight the California tax authorities because they had decided arbitrarily to reclassify comics from literature to sign painting for tax purposes.

BWI: Sign painting?

NG: Yes, because if it’s sign painting, then you have to charge sales tax on it. They wanted to get the Charles Schultzes and all these rich cartoonists, so to try and set a precedent, what they did was go after a guy named Paul Mavrides in San Francisco who did “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” comics and had no money and earned no money. They thought, “okay, we’ll get him—once we’ve got him, we have a precedent, and then we go after the big guys, and we get them to all charge sales tax.” But an author charges no sales tax when he hands over a manuscript. So we went to ground. We said, “This is a First Amendment issue.” And we fought it, and we won.

Some battles we lose. The Mike Diana case. Mike Diana, not very far from here—Pensacola, Florida. He did a fanzine called Boiled Angel, self-published, photocopied maybe 800 of which maybe 30 or 40 went out for sale, and the rest of them got traded with people. And, Mike got arrested. Overnight in jail, let out on bail, had a court case in which the Legal Defense Fund flew in expert witnesses. They had Art Spiegelman coming from New York, and they had someone coming from the Comic Art Museum in San Francisco. At the end of it, the District Attorney pointed out to the 12 good men on the jury that the community standards of Pensacola, Florida were not those of the crack alleys of New York or the gay bar houses of San Francisco, so they had a duty to find him guilty of obscenity. Which they did, making Mike Diana the first American artist this century to be found guilty of obscenity for his own work. He was sentenced to three years in prison, suspended, $1,000 fine, 1,000 hours of community service, psychiatric treatment at his own expense, and a course in journalistic ethics at his own expense. He was not allowed within 10 feet of anybody under the age of 18, which rather destroyed his job at his gas convenience store. Furthermore, he was forbidden from drawing anything else that a jury, a judge, or a local authority might find obscene, and the local sheriffs’ department was ordered to make 24-hour spot checks on his rooms to make sure he wasn’t drawing anything. Now, I’m sorry, if that had happened in any other media it would have been on the cover of TIME magazine. Instead it was comics. We fought it all the way to the Supreme Court who declined to hear it. This is the first American artist to be convicted—and they say, “if it’s community standards, we’re not interested.” We did get Mike the right to leave Pensacola, Florida, which was good, and he did his community service telling school kids in New York what had happened to him. And, furthermore, the New York police department was much too busy with catching criminals to make spot checks at 2:00 a.m. to see if Mike Diana was drawing stuff. But, that’s one that we lost. And all of these things take money.

So, basically my role these days is, I’m on the board of directors. I’m still doing what I can to help fund raise. Plus, deciding whether we take cases, whether we don’t take cases.

BWI: Fund raise among whom?

NG: Well, a lot of what we’ve been doing in amongst comics creators and comics readers. What I was doing for years was, I would go on the road for a week once a year, and I’d do a couple of readings. We’d take a small theatre, five hundred seater, sell tickets for it. I could fill a theatre. And, I’d just spend an evening. I’d read some stuff. I’d do some question-and-answer. I’d do some more readings, and people were very happy. When we finished doing it, we did a video called “Live at the Aladdin” (which you can still get) for the Legal Defense Fund, which sort of memorialized what I was doing. We have the whole of the last tour on back tape, so we could theoretically put a CD together for people as well.

BWI: You do a lot of introductions to things. Is that something you enjoy doing?

NG: Sometimes. I go through phases. I’m just getting to the end right now of doing introductions and helping being nice phase. I’m just getting to the point where, when the current introduction which is for a Robert Silverberg book,The Man in the Maze is handed in, I’m gone. I’m saying “no” right now, and I’ll probably keep saying no for six months, eight months, a year, eighteen months, and then something will come along. You know, there are some things you can’t say no to. I was asked by Douglas Adams’ agent, a request from his publisher, which came apparently from his widow and his agent, saying, would I do the introduction to their big collected “Hitchhikers” which just came out. Yes, absolutely, obviously. So there are things that you say “yes” to, and there are things where it’s a book you love, or it’s sometimes where it can make the difference with my doing the introduction between it’s selling 500 copies and it’s selling 15 to 20,000. It can mean the difference between a publisher taking it seriously or not taking it seriously. And, especially if I have something to say I will do it, except, there comes a point, it goes in waves, and I’ll go, “I’ve done enough of these, I’ve done enough blurbs—not blurbing anything for a year or two.” And then I stop.

BWI: I’m just curious, what brings you to the States?

NG: It was a combination of things, part of which were two or three things coming together all at the same time. My wife is American and had a hankering to go back. At the time that we moved pretty well all I was doing was for DC Comics, which meant that I was getting paid in dollars which, at the time this was going on, the international exchange rates were going up and down. And it’s hard enough having a free-lance life style at the best of times without going, “Well, all right, I have a $2,000 check coming in—I don’t know if that means it will be 1,000 pounds, 1,500 pounds, or 2,000 pounds when the check clears.” There was no prediction at all, and I liked the idea of going to a country where I could actually spend these things. And, also I’d always had a hankering to live in an Addams Family house, ever since I was a little kid looking at those Addams Family cartoons. I said to my wife, “If you can find an Addams Family house for me, I will move.” And, she came out to the mid-West for a couple of days, came back and said, “Found your house.” (Glorious, strange old brick, Addams Family house built in 1880. Forest and woodlands, and, I have to say, cost me rather less than a one-bedroom flat in London would have cost at the time I bought it.)

BWI: Are there things you really miss?

NG: Yes, but the biggest thing that I really miss, I’ve now more or less rectified. I really, really miss English Radio 4, except now, with the Internet, it’s on anywhere with a land Internet access, I just turn on Radio 4. The world has got peculiarly smaller.

BWI: How do you feel about this surge in acceptance of graphic novels into libraries?

NG: I really look forward to the point where—if you go into a library now there are some books you know will be in there, you know there will be a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. There will be a copy of Lord of the Flies. There are some books that are going to be there. There will be a copy of Huckleberry Finn. I would love to be at the point where Watchman, Maus, Understanding Comics, “Sandman”—the basics, the core stuff, is in every library. Just assumed to be there in the same way that you would be surprised to go into the library that didn’t have a copy of The Catcher in the Rye.

BWI: Would you like to see it integrated into the collection?

NG: I don’t mind. I started to be much more impressed by bookstores that filed “Sandman” books under “G” in Literature next to American Gods and Coraline. You know, when Neil Gaiman readers come in, that’s where they’re going to look for it. Why are we sticking them over here with the “Calvin and Hobbs” collections? Why not put them over here in “G”. But, at the end of the day, as long as they’re there, it goes back to the whole, “If you build it, they will come.” If you’ve got it in the library, someone can look around and go, “Excuse me, where is your Watchman, where is your Understanding Comics, where’s Ghostworld?” Everyone doesn’t have to have an advanced set of stuff. Everybody doesn’t have to be cutting edge. You know, so long as every library has their Watchman, their Dark Land, their Maus, I would be completely happy. Once you can find that, you’re hooked, you’re ours, we own your soul forever. This is all we really want to do.

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