The Big Sleep Unknown

This North Point Press trade edition is based on the illustrated limited edition designed and produced by Arion Press. Arion "produces some of the most beautiful limited-edition books in the world," according to the New York Times. For the third in its series of classic detective novels, the Arion Press selected photographer Lou Stoumen to visualize the rich girls, hoodlums, and petty grifters with whom Chandler peopled Los Angeles in the 1940s. The characters were costumed and posed in the manner of motion picture publicity stills. The resulting photographs depict crucial events in the story, like a "paper movie", as Stoumen writes in his afterword. In designing The Big Sleep, Andrew Hoyem recalled modern styles current when the novel appeared half a century ago.