Stardust

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, my thanks to Charles Vess. He is the nearest thing we have today to the great Victorian fairy painters, and without his art as an inspiration none of these words would exist. Every time I finished a chapter I phoned him up and read it to him, and he listened patiently and he chuckled in all the right places.

My thanks to Jenny Lee, Karen Berger, Paul Levitz, Mer-rilee Heifetz, Lou Aronica, Jennifer Hershey and Tia Maggini: each of them helped make this book a reality.

I owe an enormous debt to Hope Mirrlees, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell and C.S. Lewis, wherever they may currently be, for showing me that fairy stories were for adults too.

Tori lent me a house, and I wrote the first chapter in it, and all she asked in exchange was that I make her a tree.

There were people who read it as it was being written, and who told me what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong. It’s not their fault if I didn’t listen. My thanks in particular to Amy Horsting, Lisa Henson, Diana Wynne Jones, Chris Bell and Susanna Clarke.

My wife Mary and my assistant Lorraine did more than their share of work on this book, for they typed the first few chapters from my handwritten draft, and I cannot thank them enough.

The kids, to be frank, were absolutely no help at all, and I truly don’t think I’d ever have it any other way.

Neil Gaiman, June 1998