Welcome to the Crowdsourcing Mornings segment! Every weekday morning, Geek Alabama talks about and features one crowdsourcing project from crowdsourcing sites such as, Indiegogo, and others. The hope with Crowdsourcing Mornings is to feature and help a project be successful and reach its fundraising goal. Please enjoy today’s featured project!
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Lorenzo Mattotti and Patton Oswalt reimagine GULLIVER’S TRAVELS. Three centuries after its scandalous debut, Swift’s wild satirical adventure tale returns as a blazing new art book, brought to life by a pair of our greatest visual artists and comic minds.
A tale of shipwrecks, giants, utopias and paradoxes. A man lost at sea, encountering the impossible: floating cities, talking animals, forgotten civilizations, and technological empires. GULLIVER’S TRAVELS: a book disguised as a fantastical travelogue, then detonated as one of the fiercest cultural weapons in literary history. Now reimagined as an Illuminated Edition with images by Italian graphic artist Lorenzo Mattotti, with original essays by Patton Oswalt and Elizabeth Bellamy.
Welcome, friends, to strange new worlds. Let’s get lost at sea.
London, three hundred years ago. A porter arrives under the cloak of night to deliver a curious manuscript to publisher Benjamin Motte. It bears the name of a surgeon, Lemuel Gulliver, who had supposedly spent decades lost at sea, discovering unknown lands and peoples.
The book is Gulliver’s Travels, the immortal satire by Jonathan Swift, a ludicrous tale of people of impossible sizes, hyper-intelligent horses, and floating islands in the sky. On its face, it was a playful adventure. But underneath its fantastical exterior was a deranged and visionary fantasia attacking the utopian madnesses of Enlightenment thinking, the brutality and violence of the peak of European colonialism, and the preposterous figure that is modern man himself.
It was released as a hoax into a British empire primed for colonial adventures, and then endlessly praised, blamed, eventually banned for “wickedness and obscenity.” Over the course of three centuries, it has earned its troublesome place in the Western canon, where it sits uncomfortably among other works that Swift would likely skewer.
And now, Lorenzo Mattotti — one of the world’s greatest living illustrators — has brought Gulliver’s Travels to blazing life.
His images amplify the black humor and joyous inventiveness of Swift’s opus, with a vision as intricate as Lilliput, as charming as Gulliver’s mad tale, and as grotesque as Swift’s jaundiced view of human civilization itself. Mattotti’s Gulliver is by turns comic, monstrous, and sublime — a vision as unclassifiable and enduring as the book itself.
The Illuminated GULLIVER’S TRAVELS is available in three editions:
- a STANDARD EDITION slipcase hardcover
- a NUMBERED EDITION with a clothbound slipcase and several added production effects, signed and numbered in a limited edition of three hundred
- a LETTERED EDITION nested in a marvelous clamshell solander housing with laser-cut metal plates mounted on its French doors, signed and lettered A-Z in an edition of twenty-six, including an original drawing from Lorenzo Mattotti
All fourteen titles in the Illuminated Editions series — detailed and depicted below in the ILLUMINATED EDITIONS section — are available through this campaign, and we offer certain discounts on bulk orders. Each title also comes as a DRM-free digital PDF, which is included along with every print edition.
As of November 6th, this project has raised $36,000 of their $80,000 goal. This project has 14 days left to raise the $80,000 or it will not be funded. For a pledge of $25, you will get one digital PDF book. For a pledge of $100, you will get one hardcover book. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beehivebooks/gulliver?
