Southampton - Just in time for the season, Head Butler released a new version of the timeless holiday classic, The New Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" in e-book form edited by best selling author and journalist Jesse Kornbluth with 22 brilliant illustrations by acclaimed East Hampton artist Paige Peterson.

Like many a caring parent, Kornbluth, remembering with great fondness the annual reading of the holiday tale at his boarding school, attempted to share that same warm feeling with his young daughter Helen, age eight. But much to his chagrin, after five minutes the little girl said, "I'm bored."

Kornbluth chose not to blame her near-total boredom with the saga of Ebenezer Scrooge on the much talked about short attention span of children in this age of computer games, texting and instant gratification in an overly permissive culture. Instead he set about on a journey to bring Dickens' story into the 21st century - not by re-writing it but by updating the archaic prose, trimming the dialogue, cutting the extraneous characters and reducing the 28,000 words to their essence. The end result is a book half the length but coupled with Peterson's illustrations that still shows both the darkness and the light of the original morality tale.

Best selling author Jesse Kornbluth. (Courtesy Photo: Alchmyst PR)

As Kornbluth noted, and many early readers agree, the new "gently abridged" version conveys "The feeling of London in 1843 without the formal diction and Victorian heaviness - it means to be a story that adults can read to their captivated kids right to the end, and that kids, starting with my daughter, can read by themselves with pleasure."
The end result for all is an immensely readable story, much the length that Dickens himself read in 127 public readings he himself performed using an abridged version.

Kornbluth turned to his longtime friend artist Peterson to create the images that would capture perfectly the period. Due to the high cost of printing at the time, the original version only had eight illustrations, four black and white and four hand-colored plates. With the freedom of the e-book, Peterson was able to create 22 powerful images that ring true to the era and capture the bleakness and often despair that was a sign of the times.

In approaching the task of the drawings, Peterson says "I wanted the illustrations to be macabre. dark, stark, scary, mysterious - Victorian. Many children worked 16 hours a day. It was cold. It was bleak. Life was harsh and hard. There was always hunger. Scrooge was angry - hostile - revengeful - thin lipped. Mean old man. He had no joy. Or love in his heart. He was angry. Void of empathy or compassion. I wanted you to see that in his face. I wanted you to feel the horrid afterlife of Marley. I went to the library and brought every illustrated Dickens book I could find to a table and took in the images. While still at the library I took my pen to paper. I began drawing. They were rough sketches; I went home and used my watercolor paints to give texture and depth. I wanted them to be raw and simple and not particularly obvious. In the end, the light of awareness bursts forth in color."

Artist Paige Peterson. (Courtesy Photo: Alchmyst PR)

The e-book is available in Kindle at Amazon.com or at Barnes & Noble in Nook for only $2.99. As Peterson is a cancer survivor and activist, a portion of sales will go to the Huntsman Cancer Institute.
About The Creators
As a magazine journalist, Kornbluth has been a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, New York, Architectural Digest, Reader's Digest, The Los Angeles Times Magazine and Departures, and a contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, etc. As an author, his books include "Airborne: The Triumph and Struggle of Michael Jordan;" "Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken;" "Pre-Pop Warhol;" "Notes from the New Underground" and "The Other Guy Blinked" (with Roger Enrico). Most recently, he helped Twyla Tharp on "The Collaborative Habit." On the Web, he co-founded Bookreporter.com, now the hub of the Internet's most successful non-commercial book network. From 1997 to 2002, he was Editorial Director of America Online. In 2004, he launched HeadButler.com, a cultural concierge.

As an artist, Peterson has shown extensively in Maine, California and New York, where she is represented by the Gerald Peters Gallery. The Guild Hall Academy of the Arts in East Hampton recently honored her with a lifetime membership. As an illustrator, she co-authored with Christopher Cerf the best-selling book "Blackie, The Horse Who Stood Still." She is a Vice President at Welcome Books and co-director of an imprint, Cerf & Peterson. As an advocate for cancer research, she is a Senior Vice President of the Huntsman Cancer Foundation and speaks around the country on The Power of Attitudinal Healing through the Huntsman Cancer Institute and Attitudinal Healing International.