(Nick Bantock reads at Elliott Bay Book Company at 7 pm on Monday, April 28th. The reading is free.)

Chances are good that if you were ever in a long-distance relationship after 1991, you've probably encountered Nick Bantock's Griffin and Sabine trilogy. The books are beautiful, totemic objects depicting a long-distance relationship between a man and a woman who are separated by more than just space—they learn that through some bizarre eldritch mechanics, they can't occupy the same place at the same time. Each of the letters and postcards between Griffin and Sabine are represented physically in the books—you open an envelope and pull the folded letter out to read it—which lands them squarely in the realm between epistolary novels, comic books, and art books.

Speaking as someone whose first real love affair started as a long-distance correspondence—through the mail, no less—I can personally attest to Bantock's appeal. We identified with the Griffin and Sabine books the way other young couples embrace a pop song or a movie, absorbing the characters so much into ourselves that it's impossible to recall our romance without also remembering those books. They provided us with a vocabulary for what we were feeling, and they added an element of mystery and adventure to our teenage love affair.

So receiving a letter from Nick Bantock in the mail is a serious head trip. Bantock agreed to a mail interview in advance of his appearance in Seattle to support his new book, The Trickster's Hat: A Mischievous Apprenticeship in Creativity (Penguin, $20). His handwriting looks like a perfect mix of Griffin's and Sabine's, as though he were the product of their relationship and not the other way around...

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