We're trying to find a second edition of our celebrated edition of THE FAIRY TALES OF OSCAR WILDE, illustrated by Yuko Shimizu with an introduction by Michael Cunningham. And to do so, we're offering the new edition at a discount, and including a signed, limited edition gold-foiled fine art print from Yuko herself.

Welcome to a new experiment from your friends in the Beehive.

In 2017, we launched what may be our best-beloved project: Illuminated Editions. The series invites exceptional visual artists to re-imagine literary classics through a full suite of illustrations and illuminated letters. We interweave the new art and the original text to create a singular art object that tells classic tales in an entirely new way. Each book opens with an original essay introduction, which invite experts and innovators to explore, interpret, and contextualize the text and artwork.

We've been lucky to work with some of the most visionary artists and writers working today. We've published editions illustrated by Dave McKean, Brecht Evens, Bill Sienkiewicz, Rebekka Dunlap, Jim Woodring and many more, with writing from Guillermo Del Toro, Alan Moore, Darren Aronofsky, Brooke Bolander, among other luminaries.

Our best-selling and most award-winning project to date is one of our launch titles: a glorious anthology of the complete fairy tales of Oscar Wilde brought to life by the impossibly gorgeous, ornate, haunting illustrations of Yuko Shimizu (BARBED WIRE BASEBALL, THE UNWRITTEN), with a lyrical introduction from Pulitzer-winning novelist Michael Cunningham (THE HOURS, A WILD SWAN).

Here's a lovely video from our friend Daisy at Beautiful Books, exploring the edition in exquisite detail. She's far too kind, but we are deeply proud of the work that Yuko made here, and the way we've presented it.

This is our first Illuminated Edition to sell out its original printing. (If you’ve got one on pre-order, don’t worry – we’ve got yours!) We want to meet your appetite for this marvelous book and bring you a brand new edition. But with the current state of the supply chain, reprinting is very pricey, and as a small press with big ambitions we frankly don't have a lot of spare funds laying around. So that brings us to our experiment.

We'd like to raise enough to do a full second edition of THE FAIRY TALES OF OSCAR WILDE. In order to do so, we're offering the second printing to you at a discount, and adding in a special brand-new Yuko Shimizu foil print exclusive to this campaign.

We're also offering discounted sets of our current catalog of nine Illuminated Editions (titles detailed below).

I'll be honest -- we have no idea if there's enough demand for a reprint to fund the sum we need. This is very much an experiment. This campaign is all-or-nothing, like a Kickstarter -- if we don’t reach our funding goal within the 60 day time frame, your pledge will not be charged. 

We're not doing this on Kickstarter because it seems better fitted to Crowdfundr's new platform, which is a bit more customizable than Kickstarter’s more formal approach. We’re always interested in exploring new mechanisms and platforms to get our projects done, and we figured that since we’ve already funded this book on Kickstarter, this was a nice chance to try something new. We still love Kickstarter and will be back on there soon with new campaigns. Please let us know if you have any questions about the Crowdfundr platform and how it works -- or about anything else at all. We're learning with you.

Our standard edition is an oversize 9x12" hardcover, bound in sewn signatures, and housed in an elaborately embossed and debossed die-cut slipcase, silk-screened or foil-stamped with artwork.

The interior is printed on creamy, acid-free heavy-weight 140gsm uncoated paper with a fine tooth, and each edition includes a minimum of ten full page illustrations, along with numerous spot drawings, illuminated letters, and special design pieces. The package is designed by Beehive's creative director Maëlle Doliveux with a restrained graphic boldness, and an unparalleled eye for beauty, clarity and readability.

Without further ado, here are the nine titles available through this campaign.

Early in his career, Oscar Wilde produced two books of fairy tales -- The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates. They've rarely been collected in one volume, and never with the stunning artwork of Yuko Shimizu (The Unwritten, Barbed Wire Baseball), one of the most celebrated and admired editorial illustrators in the world. As the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Cunningham writes in his introduction to our volume, this collaboration is "a meeting of such extraordinary talents the book itself emanates the minute traces of a pulse.

H.G. Wells' gleefully blasphemous tale of human chimeras and deranged scientific curiosity comes to nightmarish life through the supreme brushwork and unmatched vision of Bill Sienkiewicz (Elektra: Assassin, Big Numbers). His Illuminated Edition of The Island of Doctor Moreau is accompanied by an introduction by none other than Guillermo Del Toro, a modern maker of monsters who brought us such Moreau-vian horrors as Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water.

 Algernon Blackwood's turn-of-the-century occult sagas had a huge impact on many 20th century masters, including H.P. Lovecraft, who believed that his masterwork The Willows was the greatest supernatural tale in all of English literature. But in the 110 years since its original publication, The Willows has floated in and out of print, without the wide recognition it deserves. But now the celebrated cartoonist and graphic artist Paul Pope (Batman Year 100, Battling Boy), whose energetic brushwork seems to writhe and vibrate on the page, brings this story to life along with four other classic Blackwood horror tales.

The beloved classic fantasy adventure Peter Pan has been adapted countless times for film, stage, and spin-offs, but it's never been seen as depicted by the watercolors of celebrated Belgian cartoonist Brecht Evens. This elaborate version of Barrie's perennial masterwork takes an inventive approach to world-building, treating Neverland as an imaginative space of infinite possibility to explore. Pirate ships, lost cities, fairy societies, unknowable beasts and magical creatures -- each of which fall, as Barrie wrote, "somewhere between reality and all we've ever dreamed."

The Blazing World is one of the most fascinating, unusual and astonishing pieces of literature in the English language. Written in 1666 by Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, the story follows a young woman who is transported to a world of animal-people, becomes their empress, and eventually leads an invasion back into her own world. The tale involves spirit possession, astral projection, the many-worlds theory, and an interdimensional queer romance, making it perfectly suited to the mindbending, otherworldly art of illustrator Rebekka Dunlap.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment, arguably the first modern exploration of psychological realism, is not only a gem of Russian literature but an internationally renowned classic. Now this masterpiece has been vividly transformed by the powerful illustrations of award-winning artist Dave McKean, whose multimedia paintings are shrouded with the specters and shadows of Raskolnikov’s fever dreams.

The Italian illustrators known as the Balbusso Twins take on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, bringing out the richness, satire and sorrow that suffuses this saga of decadence, corruption and love. Their modern illustration style highlights the incredible relevance of Fitzgerald's story, which has only seemed to increase over time. Their illustrations bring us into Gatsby's world -- but they also bring Gatsby into ours. Featuring an introduction by William Cain, the Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College specializing in 19th and early 20th century American literature.

Visionary cartoonist Jim Woodring chose to illustrate an unclassifiable 1920 novel by the legendary British writer David Lindsay. A Voyage to Arcturus is a baffling amalgam of mysticism, science fiction, sexual politics, and outrageous fantasy, and stands as one of the greatest works of sustained, untrammeled imagination ever achieved. Woodring’s drawings capture the writhing currents of interacting forces that lie beneath the wonderfully arcane prose. Featuring an introduction by Alan Moore.

The great painter and multimedia artist Kent Williams depicts the supernatural Japanese stories of Lafcadio Hearn, originally published in his books Kwaidan and Shadowings. These books are full of ghost stories, nightmares and strange tales -- of possessed forests, of monks tormented by demons and ghosts, of corpse brides, man-eating goblins, and undead samurai. They come to life as never before under Williams' brush. Featuring an introduction by filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, a foreword by writer Kyoko Yoshida, and an essay by Hearn's great-grandson and director of the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum, Bon Koizumi.

Yuko Shimizu is a multi-award-winning Japanese illustrator based in New York City, Shimizu is an instructor at The School of Visual Arts and has almost 20 years of experience illustrating. Her work includes multiple disciplines from DC Comic covers (Sandman the Dream Hunters, The Unwritten, Batman), Criterion Collection DVD jackets (Godzilla box set), and advertising for Apple, Nike and Pepsi. Additionally she has collaborated with the Smithsonian Museum and Library of Congress. Shimizu is a two-time Hugo Award nominee and was recently awarded the Caldecott Honor, one of the highest awards for picture books, for her work on the children’s book The Cat Man of Aleppo (Penguin, 2020).

BEEHIVE BOOKS is a Philadelphia-based small press founded by artist and designer Maëlle Doliveux and author and editor Josh O’Neill. They create book art editions of literary and pictorial works with a special emphasis on graphic art, design, and experimentation. Their catalogue includes monographs on Harrison Cady and Herbert Crowley; a line of lavishly illustrated classic novels featuring artists like Dave McKean, Yuko Shimizu, Jim Woodring and Mike Mignola; the ongoing experimental periodical LAAB Magazine, created and curated by Ronald Wimberly, and much more. Experts in crowdfunding and fulfillment, the Beehive team have run and fulfilled over a dozen Kickstarter campaigns, raised nearly three million dollars, and shipped tens of thousands of books to customers around the globe.

We build paper worlds.