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Redwall: The Collector's Edition - Hardcover

Jacques, Brian

 
9798217318698: Redwall: The Collector's Edition
Hardcover
ISBN 13: 9798217318698
Verlag: Philomel Books, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Rediscover the book that inspired a legend with this stunning collector’s edition, a must-have for all Redwall fans! Join Matthias on his quest to defend Redwall Abbey with the original tale that started it all, now featuring bonus, never-before-seen content.

This gorgeous hardcover package includes a cloth-bound, foil-stamped cover, gilded edges, and a ribbon bookmark!

For decades, Redwall has held a special place in readers’ hearts. Bucolic countryside and friendly forest creatures come up against evil, violent foes in an epic tale that’s stood the test of time. The Redwall saga is an enduring classic, one that has captured our imagination for generations.

Now relive the glory of battle, the delightful feasts, and the pure courage of one little mouse with this stunning collector’s edition. Come back to where it all began with the first Redwall tale, read about the history of the series in a new foreword from longtime editor Patti Gauch, and explore the world of Redwall through gems from the saga’s storied past, all in a beautiful keepsake package.

For all Redwall fans young and young at heart, this collector’s edition is not to be missed.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Brian Jacques was born in Liverpool in 1939. He left school at age fifteen and found work as a docker, a truck driver, a policeman, and a stand-up comic, all before turning his attention to writing. He wrote his first novel, Redwall, for the children at a school for the blind in Liverpool. Since 1986, his descriptive style of writing has captivated readers from ages eight to eighty. His books have won international awards and acclaim and have been made into a TV series. He passed away in 2011.

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Behind the Red Wall

In Search of a Story

We begin this Collector’s Edition of Redwall with some words and thoughts on this book, this series, and their collective history from Brian Jacques’s American editor . . .

I will always think of Brian Jacques, author and incredible storyteller, lying on his stomach on a sunny day in his small Liverpool backyard. Having recovered from a cold, the warmth was settling into his bones when, for a reason he didn’t remember afterward, he looked up, and there, marching through the glistening afternoon grass in oversized sandals and a novice robe, was a small mouse. “Matthias,” he whispered to himself. Matthias was, as Brian very quickly realized, a mouse in search of a story; in fact, he was the very mouse Brian Jacques followed into his Redwall epic.

A BBC personality with a Sunday morning radio show—an eclectic mixture of local Liverpool lore, comedy, music, and often his favorite excerpts from opera—Brian had lovingly “adopted” the children of the Royal Liverpool School for the Blind as his charity and would often visit and tell stories to them, playing all the roles—usually animals—in whatever story he was creating. He insisted the stories be “a good yarn,” the brighter and bolder and more brash, the better. It was, he always said, what the children demanded.

The editor and author have a special relationship, often a long one. I was Brian Jacques’s American editor, his literary shadow for over ten years. His stories, his characters, the incredible beauty and power of his language were something of a miracle to me, a one-time writer myself. Over time, knowing Brian and his stories better, I came to know even the epic’s backstories. I loved to discover them, particularly through Brian’s storyteller roar.

One of the first was about the abbey Redwall itself. Fantasy often has elements of reality in it. Tolkien once wrote in his famous book Tree and Leaf that secondary (fantasy) worlds derive from the primary world. Brian needed a world for Matthias, and red-walled Childwall Abbey Hotel, a one-time country house, came to him as being just the place. He molded it with his pen and giant-sized imagination—its soft-red sandstone walls way stronger in his telling, bigger with its majestic stone towers and battlements—into an abbey of chattering, cheerful, peace-loving mice, badgers, hares, otters, and occasional travelers, not royalty like the Arthurian tales but common folk: the working monks, a logging crew of working shrews, Foremole and his industrious builders.

Still, not a place for war but a peaceable abbey with overflowing gardens and ponds and trees blossoming into their seasons, a kitchen busy with a friar mouse chef ordering his mice bakers to crimp the quince pies and stir the peach soufflés, the cooks to lay out the broiled grayling ready for the next feast. With the children of Redwall, the dibbuns, up to their bedtime shenanigans, avoiding the evening bath if possible, engaging in dibbun talk and tease with their bedtime friars.

There was in Brian’s Redwall a tapestry of a small, diminutive mouse warrior from an earlier time hanging on an abbey wall. It was Martin the Warrior, a warrior but strangely without a sword. Not so different in size from Matthias, the good father abbot pointed out. Was there a less peaceful time at Redwall, then? And the question hanging over the tapestry itself in those first pages: Could that warrior return if they needed him? Could they find the missing sword? In reading or hearing Redwall, a reader or listener could master the ancient abbey, hear it, and feel it. Brian Jacques simply brought an ancient Redwall world and its creatures, one by one, to exuberant life—including young Matthias and the good Abbot Mortimer.

Where did Brian Jacques’s storytelling skills come from? Where did those voices—almost every animal’s different—come from? The young voice of the mouse Matthias; the always hungry, slightly grumpy voice of Basil Stag Hare; the endearing voice of Cornflower, in time mouse love of Matthias; Scouser voices of the Guosim shrews; rustic voices of the builder Foremole. Voices alive with their differences. Brian’s father was a hauler on the Liverpool docks; did Brian’s ease in capturing or creating voices come naturally from Brian’s hearing the cacophony of languages that passed through his father’s world? Liverpool collected people from across the world into its harbor. In fact, Liverpudlians—“Scousers” as they are still called—are, as a people, storytellers.

Somewhere, Brian came to know books as well. Perhaps his storytelling and voices came from there. The first book that Brian bought for himself—with great and remembered delight—was The Odyssey by Homer, no child’s primer but a courageous seafaring journey of Odysseus among the creatures and islands of the Aegean Sea. Brian was fourteen and, excited by a teacher’s introduction of the Greeks, saved up seven shillings and a sixpence, went into a dusty used Liverpool bookstore searching for the precious book—only this book would do—and found it. Did this classical seafaring journey of Odysseus to Ithaca wake up his poetic seafaring storytelling soul? He remembered it as such.

But music and tale-telling were simply part of Brian Jacques’s everyday life. Once, honoring one of his books’ publications, I joined a party of his friends and family at his favorite Liverpool restaurant, and as luck would have it, his brother Jimmy and old friends had gathered, leaning into their circle of song, belting out sea shanties—those hearty songs Irish sailors sang to make the shipboard work lighter—one after another, and sang with such all-out gusto that the room reverberated. I could hear the sea, the ship’s bones creaking, the sails whipping, the booming voices—Brian Jacques’s among them—matching it all. Later, remembering, I said to myself, “Ah, that’s where the Redwall narrator came from!” The Redwall narrator could be a poet, starting off the epic tales with: “It was the start of the Summer of the Late Rose. Mossflower country shimmered gently in a peaceful haze.” He could also shout out guttural warnings, the first upon the approach of Cluny the Scourge, the one-eyed rat, and his hordes promising an attack on the peaceful abbey.

Brian always recited the gutsy passage of Cluny coming when he visited hundreds of classrooms across America. He’d lean forward over his knee, squint in his one-eyed Cluny way, and his voice would whisper and then roar: “The high, warm sun shone down on Cluny the Scourge. Cluny was coming! He was big, and tough; an evil rat with ragged fur and curved, jagged teeth. He wore a black eyepatch; his eye had been torn out in battle with a pike. Cluny had lost an eye. The pike had lost its life!”

When did Brian Jacques become a writer? His early teachers, it seems, did not think he was one at all. Rather, he was the class clown. Brash, the center of attention, full of outrageous wit and humor, always performing for his fellows. But, it seemed, there was no promise he was a writer. When a fourth-grade teacher assigned a story, and young Brian Jacques turned in a surprising fable about a bird who cleaned a crocodile’s teeth, molded by words and rhythms and a telling that sparkled with originality, the teacher did not believe it was Brian’s, and when he would not admit it, caned him. How could it be Brian Jacques’s—the class clown, the performer? The time would come when the teachers and the school discovered otherwise. Class clowns, they learned, could be poets, singers, entertainers of the first rank, and storytellers as well.

When Brian began to write the Redwall saga, he wrote it in a kind of flourishing longhand in a small writing shed in his back garden. Writing the tale first in that way, he said, helped him get to the drama, the emotional peaks, of Redwall, the moments that often bristled with risk and reality and the passion of story. He insisted on that power. I can see him leaning into his stories just as his brother and mates leaned into the shanty songs all those years after. The Redwall stories would come to him, powerfully, as if through his fingers, in that flourishing longhand. Alone in the writing shed, was he performing the story to the legal-sized notepad in front of him in that elegant hand? There is no question that Brian Jacques himself became the story: the abbots, the dibbuns, the badger Constance, the militarist Basil Stag Hare, the hardworking Foremole all by his own hand.

As editor, I once asked Brian if he could include one creature in his newest Redwall novel that was more balanced, more ambiguous, not all good or all bad, maybe a character that could change. Brian, who had an incredible confidence about his stories, that narrator’s brash certainty, said, “No. Never. Because, my girl, bad is clearly and always bad and needs to be defeated, and good needs to be honored, always.” Can you hear his voice? The rhythms of his Liverpool accent? This was the dichotomy of Redwall and all of Brian’s early books: bad was bad and good was good. It was exactly what he believed and what he wanted, until many years later, when he allowed that there might be ambiguity in a good tale.

There were always children in the room, metaphorically, when Brian Jacques wrote, his earliest audience still the children at the Royal Liverpool School for the Blind. With them in mind, he wrote the actual manuscript in short, punchy chapters, dramatically visual with strong concrete images that the children could imagine and passion to engage them and take them—without flinching—into the worlds where evil was often lurking, waiting for just one opportunity to attack the peaceful abbey. It became a familiar battle, the forces of evil determined to win the peace-loving Redwall Abbey. For the inhabitants of the monastery, it was a never-ending fight for the common life, for the good life, for feasts at table, and for friendships as crucial as food itself. For the children of the abbey as well, it was a quest to remain children who would be children, but who, given the right moment, like Matthias, would rise to be heroes in their own right, taking their places in a world that needed to love peace. The constant vigilance for peace was in Brian Jacques’s bones. We all knew it: his editors, his family, his children at the Royal School for the Blind, and all children and readers of every age.

In the final battle of this book, we share in the loss of the good abbot, fallen to the Cluny charge. Brian gives him unforgettable last words. The Abbot has been wounded. Constance the badger raises the Abbot’s head to respond to his last wish: “The friends I know and love are all about me. Redwall, our home, is safe. The sun shines warmly upon us . . . Life is good, my friends. I leave it to you. Do not be sad, for mine is a peaceful rest.” With these soulful last words, Brian cements his forever call toward peace.

It was 1983 when Brian began to think this Redwall yarn might be a book. This belief led him to the Liverpool train station, carrying his now-typed manuscript in a grocery bag, thinking some publisher might like his yarn. On the way, Brian met one of his former teachers from the St. John’s School, Alan Durbin, who had also taught Paul McCartney. Durbin was taking a manuscript he himself had written to his London publisher.

Durbin asked, “Brian Jacques, where are you going with that plastic bag?”

“I’ve written a good yarn and am going to get it to a publisher, Mr. Durbin,” Brian replied.

“Ah, Brian,” Durbin said, “but I am going to my London publisher today! Can I take your yarn to my publisher for you?” He took it to the great British editor Caroline Roberts of Century Hutchinson, who, I am sure, heart beating, read and published Brian’s first Redwall and got it to international publishers across the world—including Philomel, where I worked and which in time became Brian’s home base.

Traditions were born with the first Redwall. Americans took to Redwall and Brian Jacques with a most passionate response. They loved the man and the book, and, beginning with the first Redwall, read each new Redwall novel for all the years the epic was published. A tradition between Brian and me came after the first Redwall, which had come to our publishing house through the mail. The new Redwalls, beginning with Martin the Warrior, came to me at my home in Hyde Park, New York, before going to the publisher’s office. His plane having landed in New York, Brian would call ahead from a car on his way to my house. “Put the kettle on for tea,” he would bark. “I’m on my way.” Yorkshire tea, that was, which he himself had brought to me from England on a previous trip.

A greeting would be quick. Tea would be quick. Then, almost upon arriving, he would lead me to my front room, where a floor-to-ceiling window let in bold rays of afternoon sun. He would take his new manuscript out of the box he carried, just for a moment hold my gaze, then turn almost spiritually to the title page and the first words. He would begin to read to me, with that resonant baritone voice that could sing a sea shanty or the lead in a Puccini opera, a narrator’s poem, the first words of the new Redwall tale. On the first occasion, that of Martin the Warrior, he read:

Amid the deep white winter snow,
Sleeps Mossflow’r until spring,
While snug in Cavern Hole below,
All Redwall’s creatures sing.
Old autumn gave us plenty,
Our harvest did not fail,
No plate or jug is empty,
There’s good October ale.

How can I explain to you how this moment came to me? These magnificent words in this magnificent voice. When I think of that sunlit window and two chairs, I can hear once again the first words of each new Redwall novel. I will always hear them.

Patricia Lee Gauch
Former editor in chief, Philomel

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Verlag
Philomel Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 13 
9798217318698
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Libri GmbH
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
Hessen
Deutschland