The
Venetian for iPad™ by Nick Bantock
Just letting you know that The Venetian, my first tale for the iPad™,
has been released as an App. Embellished with rich art and animation I
hope you'll agree that it takes storytelling to another dimension. You
can download it on the App Store for a mere pittance.
All the best
Nick
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A Message From Nick Bantock
I first had the idea for The Venetian around 1994, though the seed must
have been planted years earlier while I was watching a BBC TV program
called Connections. In the show, the presenter James Burke, talked about
Nicollo dei Conti, a Venetian Merchant from the mid 1400’s who travelled
five times around India, on to China and finally back to Venice bringing
with him an extraordinary account of the East. How, I asked myself could
someone whose exploits compared favorably with those of Marco Polo,
virtually disappear from history? I decided to find out more about the
man and went off in search of information. Like most creations there is
a gestation period between the curiosity and the outcome.
Fast forwarding to the end of the Griffin and Sabine trilogy. I wanted
to follow it with a book that integrated the then emerging phenomena of
email. However I wanted it to be more than a mere epistolary novel.
After reading Arthur Koestler’s book, “Ghost in the Machine” I began
thinking about the notion of an email dialogue between Sara, a young
woman living in the present and another character from the past. I
needed a really interesting historical figure, but one who was
relatively unknown…suddenly Nicollo Dei Conti jumped into my head. He
was perfect, a man of mystery and remarkable experience. I pictured him,
I drew him, he looked like King Lear. And like Lear he is frustrated and
needs to express his feelings of impotence to the raging heavens. After
all, he s about to be trapped in the ether for 500 years.
The Venetian in its new form is oddly closer to the way I conceived of
it than it was when it was published as a hardback book. The arrival of
the iPad™ means that the story and its telling have united and the
message and medium are one.
