A young solicitor takes a night train east to close a property deal. The peasants cross themselves when he says where he is going and one of them presses a crucifix into his hand, and he writes it all down in shorthand because he is a careful man and the details may matter to the firm. Six weeks later he is crawling down the outside of a castle wall to find out what his client keeps in the cellar.
Then the book leaves him. A ship comes ashore at Whitby in a storm with every man gone from it and the captain lashed to his own wheel, and his log is printed in the local paper. A girl who sleepwalks starts waking up tired. A doctor talks his casebook into a phonograph in the asylum next door to the house the client has just bought, while a patient in one of his cells counts flies and waits for a master he will not name. The newspapers run an escaped wolf, a woman in white on Hampstead Heath, and children coming home at dawn with two small marks on the throat.
Nobody narrates any of it. The novel is a bundle of papers and the reader is the only one holding all of them, which is the whole trick: the reader can see the shape a page before the people inside it can. What finally goes out against the Count is not a hero. It is a stack of typed transcripts, an old professor's reading, a set of title deeds and a Continental timetable. Five people and a typewriter, working out where a box of earth is going and getting there first.
Stoker worked at it for seven years and filled his notebooks with railway timetables, shipping routes, Whitby dialect and the floor plan of an asylum, because he wanted a monster who arrives by the ordinary machinery of 1897: a solicitor's appointment, a cargo manifest, the purchase of a house at Purfleet. Everything since has been downstream of it, most of it lit worse and none of it as patient.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition of the complete 1897 text, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 400 pages. All twenty-seven chapters, the closing note, Stoker's dedication and his unsigned prefatory note on how the papers were placed in sequence. The real work here is that the book is set as the documents it claims to be: journals and letters take the body measure, telegrams and newspaper cuttings and the ship's log are inset on a narrower measure so they read as matter pasted in, every document opens under its own head in italic, capitals are kept for the headlines the source itself sets in capitals, and every dated entry opens with its date. Dropped: the public domain apparatus and the modern introductions that explain the novel to you before you have read a line of it.
Paperback: perfect bound on cream stock. A workhorse copy, meant to be carried, dog-eared, and marked up.
Hardcover: casewrap edition built for the shelf and the long haul.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
