Back in college, I used some of my spare cash to buy some rarer copies (signed, limited edition, etc.). One of these books was a 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big by John Crowley. This would've been about 8-9 years ago that I placed the preorder.

At first, I checked in on it pretty routinely; seemed like there was always an update that release was just around the corner, etc., but ultimately I forgot about it after a while, though every time I moved (three apartments, two houses), I'd recall and email the publisher to update my address. Still, even then, I had pretty much given up on it, but it was past the point where I could request a refund on my account, so I figured I'd just keep updating the address.

Fast forward to last month.

January 21, the publisher on Little, Big said they were starting to ship out copies of the 25th sorry, now it's the 40th anniversary edition, but you had to confirm your shipping address (which I did on the 23rd).

It has now been over a month with no update or tracking information.

On the website, there is this line:

>With a project whose order history spans 18 years

This is not something to be proud of. Whoever has been behind the editing and publishing of this edition has royally messed up. It took longer to get this developed and released than Duke Nukem Forever, which is notorious for the amount of time it took (it holds the world record for longest development time in a video game).

Except Duke Nukem Forever was built from scratch—Little, Big was released in 1981, so by 2004 when this project began, the full text had already been out for 23 years. It took them 18 more and they still seem to be making excuses for delays.

I'm not even posting this in irritation or annoyance at this point—frankly, I'm amazed at how catastrophically incompetent the people behind this project are. I can't imagine anyone in the publishing industry is interested in hiring someone who can botch a job this badly.