I wanted to start this thread because I think there are quite a few fans of Clive Barker here. I have been collecting Clive Barker books, etc., since 1987 or so; although to be fair I was buying books back then to read, not to display on a shelf in my bedroom. I do not have a massive or ultra-rare collection of Barker related items, but what I have I am happy with. I know there are some of you out there who have some fairly rare or unique items, and I wanted this to be the perfect place to share them.

I'll start things off by posting items from my collection. I'll add to this thread periodically until I've covered most everything that I have. My hope is that others will chime in and post Clive Barker items as well. Anything and everything is welcome, there's no entry restrictions here!

Why Clive Barker?

 I came to discover Clive Barker in the same way I'd imagine many others did as well: through Stephen King's famous blurb, "I have seen the future of horror fiction, and his name is Clive Barker." With an endorsement like that, I knew that I had to track this guy down and see what the hubbub was all about. Unfortunately that was easier said than done.

In 1987 -- in the US at least -- Clive Barker was still unknown and it was virtually impossible to find anything written by him in the bookstores of the day. The Books of Blood collection had only just been published -- and only in mass market paperback at that -- so looking in the Barnes & Noble was fruitless. Thankfully, my saving grace was my local comic book shop where I spent so much of my childhood corrupting my mind. This was the same shop where I first laid eyes on a Donald M. Grant edition of Stephen King's The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger less than 2 years before. That holy grail was out of my price range at the time, I believe the shop keeper was asking a hefty $60 for the trade edition. To me, it may as well have cost eleventy-billion dollars; the difference between that and sixty being not that much when you were as broke as I was at fourteen.

The shop keeper listened intently as I rambled on to him about this amazing new horror writer -- that I'd never read -- and how he needed to stock these books immediately! Perhaps it was the passion in my voice -- or the money in my wallet, what little of it there was -- that touched something in him and he agreed to "see what he could do."

A few weeks later during one of my standard Wednesday reconnaissance trips, he called me over to the counter to show me something. When he pulled them out from behind the shelf, they were as beautiful as anything I'd ever seen. You can obviously see how twisted I was as an adolescent if I thought that these covers were "beautiful!"



Needless to say, I scraped up whatever cash I could find -- I remember running through town checking all of the pay phones and vending machines for spare change -- to buy these beauties and I absolutely devoured them. It was the most incredible horror fiction I had ever read; at once shocking, repulsive, intriguing, and it scared me shitless -- I had to have more. I of course noticed the conspicuous "By The Author of" under the title, and so my next venture was to find a copy of The Damnation Game, but I'll save that story for another time.

Let's start the collection thread!