Originally published at S. J. Chambers. You can comment here or there.

After a long and tedious week at the day job, a wonderful thing awaited me on my doorstop Wednesday night. Our wonderful editor at Abrams, Caitlin Kenney, sent Jeff VanderMeer and I the finished The Steampunk Bible. As you can see, I was stunned by the book’s beauty.

The book has come a long way, and I thought I’d share one example of how the book evolved over the year.

In the first galley, we had Kris Kuksi opening up our Maker chapter. Kris Kuksi is a modern Bernini, and one of my favorite artists around.

Then, by the time the BLADs came out, we were thinking of using Sean Orlando’s Steampunk Treehouse.

By the final run, we’d gotten the shots we needed from Jeremy Faludi of Dr. Evermore’s Forevertron, which is a huge anchor in the Maker chapter.

While the book won’t be out until May 1st, Jeff snagged an extra copy that he and Ann VanderMeer will be giving away to a lucky lady or gentleman at their SF in SF event tomorrow night.

The design of the book is very lovely, and graphic designer Galen Smith did a wonderful job interpreting Jeff’s suggestion that we allude to the first editions of Jules Verne’s novels.

A lot of people were involved with this book, and in trying to list everyone, I know I would leave someone out. So, to try and avoid that faux pas, I want to say thank you to everyone involved–you know who you are, and we couldn’t have done it without you!

We got a lot coming up for this book. Towards the end of April, about a week before the book’s release, The Steampunk Bible, Volume 2.0, will be coming out on a url near you. It will have the comprehensive vendor’s list, as well as a lot of extras like interviews with Cherie Priest, Datamancer, and Scott Westerfield.

I am also going to be doing a little bit of touring in New England for the book, and I will have details of that up here soon.