  I derive the overall best distances for all 402 known galactic novae, and I
collect their many properties. The centrepiece is the 74 novae with accurate
parallaxes from the new Gaia data release. For the needed priors, I have
collected 171 distances based on old methods (including expansion parallaxes
and extinction distances). Further, I have collected the V-magnitudes at peak
and the extinction measures, so as to produce absolute magnitudes at peak and
then derive a crude distance as a prior. Further, I have recognized that 41 per
cent of the known novae are concentrated in the bulge, with 68 per cent of
these <5.4 degrees from the galactic centre, so the 165 bulge novae must have
distances of 8000+-750 parsecs. Putting this all together, I have derived
distances to all 402 novae, of which 220 have distances to an accuracy of
better than 30 per cent. I find that the disc novae have an exponential scale
height of 140+-10 pc. The average peak absolute V-magnitude is -7.45, with an
RMS scatter of 1.33 mag. These peak luminosities are significantly correlated
with the decline rate (t_3 in days) as M_V,peak = -7.6 + 1.5 * Log[t_3 / 30].
The huge scatter about this relation masks the correlation in many smaller
datasets, and makes this relation useless for physical models. The bulge novae
are indistinguishable from the disc novae in all properties, except that the
novae with red giant companion stars have a strong preference for residing in
the bulge population.
