Years ago the Dresden Dolls had a reunion show on my birthday in New York and I

found myself standing somewhere in the back with Neil who said "Have you heard T
he Bed Song?" I said I had not. "Get Amander to play it for you," he said, "it's
really beautiful."
That was long before it came out and over the next couple of years, I would come
to know it as an incredibly beautiful song. One of the things that really amaze
s and inspires me about Amanda Palmer is that she can write a funny song, like O
asis and she can write a terribly sad song like the Bed Song. (And she rhymes "S
layer" with "dare", which is both daring and wonderful.)
If you haven't heard it, it's the story of a couple's relationship told through
the beds that they own.
When it came time to make the Theatre is Evil album, Neil and I did a very ambit
ious book version of the song. It was a $1,000 backer reward and was, basically,
a comic book script by Neil that I turned into photographs. The book took a lon
g time to produce for a number of reasons, one being that we wanted to make a bo
ok that was incontrovertibly worth a thousand dollars a copy. Another, I discove
red, was that because there was nudity in it, no printer that we approached in t
he United States would print it. (Weird, I know.)
(Video not showing up on your mobile device? click here.)
This weekend, we all met up at the Gaiman Compound (though technically it's a co
mpound, it's actually more like a fairy glade) to sign all the books. It took a
long time. SuperKate and Eric (aka Southships) spent a day unpacking boxes and p
repping things. (The book itself comes in a box, and the boxes were made on a di
fferent continent than the books, so there were boxes of boxes and boxes of book
s). While this was going on Neil introduced trillian_stars and I to the new Doct
or Who (Trillian and I hadn't seen Peter Capaldi yet, and we enjoyed the two epi
sodes we watched) and plotted the Librarian documentary and went running out in
the wilderness and saw monarch butterfly caterpillars and examined tree that pil
iated woodpeckers had been systematically dismantling to get some gigantic ants
out of and Neil cooked dinner (not ants) and then breakfast (and then lunch) and
made us "Bubble and Squeak", which I'd never had before and now I feel properly
touched by the English. & then we had to race Trillian home so she could be Lad
y Macbeth in her closing night performance, but it was grand and we saw friends
and had a swell time and this thing exists that wouldn't exist if a lot of peopl
e hadn't worked very hard on it.
When I first saw the boxes opened and the books come out (I had to wear white gl
oves) I was so happy ... they're astonishingly beautiful. The printing of my pho
tos is exquisite, the book is so well put together (AAAAAND, since we were worry
ing that people might cut their books up to frame the prints, you can actually d
isassemble the book, frame the prints, and then put the book back together later
if you want.) So many things so thoughtfully done.
Thank everybody who made it happen. It's a beautiful thing.