I posted several photos of this amazing Deluxe book in My Book Collection thread:
I posted several photos of this amazing Deluxe book in My Book Collection thread:
Looking To Buy:
Wandering Star:
Savage Tales Of Solomon Kane - leather
SubPress:
Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon - Letter V ( will trade for PC +cash)
Neal Stephenson’ Cryptomonicon and Zodiac - Letter O
My Book Collection
What was issue price of Haunting of Hill House?
WANTED:
Lettered Danse Macabre
Marshroots
Lettered Eyes Of The Dragon
Lettered The Stand
BOMC signed Full Dark No Stars
MM AGOT #249
Lettered Frankenstein
Expecting mine this week! I'm so excited - I've refrained from looking at any of the pictures online with an exception of the thumbnail-sized pic of the slipcase that some eBay sellers have up.
Ok so now that I have had a chance to hold them both and if I had to pick one over the other I would go with the Centipede Press, but it’s almost a coin flip. See the spoiler for details.
Spoiler:
A few side by side photos
Spoiler:
“Perhaps I am simply a madman who dreamt of being sane for a little while.”
— Roland Deschain
Thank you for the analysis. Interesting that the Suntup edition is punching way above it's weight (dollar-wise). As an owner of the numbered, I agree about all the details you point out that make it exceptional. But I still have a lot of love for that Centipede Press edition as well. I would not mind having both. But I'm thrilled with the one I picked.
Thank you for the great analysis. I don’t have the centipede press edition, but from your photos and description, I think I would find it hard to choose between the two editions as well.
That’s so cool you were able to get the same number for both editions.
“If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Looking for SubPress Lettered::
Angel's Game and Prisoner of Heaven (Zafon)
Ilium (Simmons)
Judging by the photo, I may have, when testing an old pen to see if it would still write, inadvertently forged Matt Mahurin's signature a number of times throughout my life.
When they said how many dollars it would cost, I was amazed at how badly they'd overvalued it - then I realized they'd overvalued the dollars as well.
Nice to see Jerad and Centipede getting some well deserved kudos. All due respect to Paul, and no offense to his DT.org customers, but sometimes the bated breath Suntup Editions infatuation here can be a bit overwhelming.
Jerad managed to make the first book that doesn't fit upright on my shelves
Is this the 2nd book Jerad publishes with the pull out slipcase? I really really really love them. It makes Ender's Game special as well
Looking for SubPress Lettered:Farseer Trilogy; Shadow of the Wind, Angel's Game, Prisoner of Heaven
Looking for Centipede Press S/L: Dracula
That looks really nice. And I do like a lot of what I see from CP. I wish I could have bought some of the other ones. But, circumstances being what they are, I had to make a choice not to get this since I had the Suntup one and was on that track. Second, these sold out before
I even realized they were for sale so I had no chance anyway. But congrats to the people who did get it. It does look like a really great edition.
My Collection
https://www.thedarktower.org/palaver...ction-MikeDuke
My Suntup Flikr page
https://www.flickr.com/people/190710085@N03/
Masters of the Weird Tale: Algernon Blackwood
Algernon Blackwood
14.a Deluxe Roman Numeral Edition – Leather – details unknown, traycased: 22 – $1000 (Red roman numerals)
14.b.i Clothbound with what appears to be black Japanese silk cloth, silver foil spine stamp, fully pictorial printed front board, lavender tissue paper overlay, missing limitation page, darker blue slipcase; unknown number of 300/500 total (more likely 300) – $250
14.b.ii Clothbound with what appears to be black Japanese silk cloth on the spine and textured blue cloth on the boards, slightly taller, silver foil spine stamp, blue tissue paper overlay, limitation page type 1, slightly lighter blue slipcase; unknown number of 300/500 total (more likely 300) – $250
14.b.iii Clothbound with different black cloth and pictorial inset on front board, slightly taller, gold foil spine stamp, metallic tissue paper overlay, limitation page type 2, black slipcase; unknown number of 300/500 total (more likely 300) – $250
14.b.iv Clothbound with different blue cloth and pictorial inset on front board, unknown height, unknown (possible no) spine stamp, unknown tissue paper overlay, unknown limitation page type ; unknown number of 300/500 total (more likely 300) – $250
Published as Centipede Press; 2006
Original price: $1000/$250
Alright. I think everyone has gotten the point that I love Centipede Press. This, however, is the first post where you will see some true evidence of my obsession.
This book is the first release after the Circle Series, and also the first release of the long-lived Masters of the Weird Tale series, which makes it doubly interesting.
It is also the first book that not only has two separate editions (deluxe and standard), but has multiple states within an edition. We’re now starting to enter my favorite era in the press, where there was a lot of experimentation with materials, stamping, sizing, and more. What’s especially interesting, and what this first book shows ample evidence of, is that a lot of that experimentation occurred within the same release.
There are at least four different states of the standard edition of this book!
There are at least three different slipcases, two different types of black cloth used, two different types of blue cloth used, several variants of a piece of art on the front board, at least two different types of endpapers, at least three different types of tissue paper covering the title page, and at least two different types of limitation page (and one version with no limitation page).
Check it out! (Most of the pictures are mine. A few aren’t, but were taken from publicly available sources and you could find them on Google if you wanted with very little work.) When all the books are present, they stay in the same order so you can tell which interior belongs to which.
The spines. It’s a little hard to tell, but you can kind of see the difference in texture on the right-most book, which has a different kind of black cloth binding. It’s also gold foil stamped instead of silver:
The tops of the slipcases, so you can see the slightly different colors:
The front covers, three versions on a theme:
And the fourth version (not my picture). Blue with an inset picture and it looks like a blank inset above it. The lower picture is a mockup, I believe, so I’m not sure if there is a fifth state that includes something in the blank inset an potentially a blank spine, or if it’s just a mockup of the fourth version, which was not produced exactly as mocked-up. I think (hope) it’s the former and there are only four copies, and thus only one more for me to acquire, but I can’t count the number of times that I thought I had all the states of a book only to hear or see about another…
Nothing too exciting for the endpapers; two plain black and one plain white:
Lavender tissue in the left-most book. There’s some neat provenance to this book, also. You may notice in the top right corner of the title page, there’s a small pencil notation “AB”. I put this here, and in other books, to note that this particular copy was from the extensive library of the late author, Avalon Brantley. She was quite the book collector before she passed and I was able to get several books I needed from her estate. She was also a pretty amazing and astonishingly erudite author of weird fiction, mostly short stories. I highly recommend checking out her work if you can. She appears in a number of anthologies of short stories (the one from Swan River Press has my favorite short story of hers) and Zagava press in Germany has done English language versions of her two longer works, one of which is in an affordable paperback version. She was a unique and special voice in weird fiction and we are all worse off for having lost her so early.
Blue tissue in the middle book:
And metallic tissue in the right-most book. The photo of Blackwood is printed on white paper, and you can also see a slightly different title page here that omits the reference to the Lee Brown Coye illustrations (which are still present):
The last page of book 1, with no limitation page!
The limitation page of book 2, pretty sparse and listing 300 as the print run:
The limitation page of book 3, with more detail on the materials, and claiming 522 copies (500 standard and 22 deluxe). My best guess is that the 300 standard copy limitation was correct, making the true limitation 322. I say this because I’ve found that on instances when I’m able to confirm a print run, it’s usually the lower of the numbers I have available.
And, finally, as requested here, a comparison of the table of contents of the MWT book and the later LWT book. (Sidenote: there are some issues with the table of contents in the MWT book not exactly matching location and order of the stories, and I believe that maybe one story was split or incomplete. There were some slipups like this earlier in the press, where clearly something changed during the layout process that was not reflected in the contents. I believe that there were also some issues in the MWT: HPL book also, but after that things get a lot tighter.)
I hope this helps!
This is the MWT book:
And here is the LWF book:
Up next – the first of a pair of David Goodis books:
Spoiler:
CP sure makes the "hunt" aspect of collecting interesting.
When they said how many dollars it would cost, I was amazed at how badly they'd overvalued it - then I realized they'd overvalued the dollars as well.
lotuz, thanks very much for posting these entries. You put a lot of work into them, and I really enjoy reading them. Fascinating stuff.
“If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Looking for SubPress Lettered::
Angel's Game and Prisoner of Heaven (Zafon)
Ilium (Simmons)
Did Centipede set out to make all of these variations, or were they the result of experimentation, screw ups, sloppiness, etc.?
For sure! It's both fun and frustrating. On one hand, I often think that I've finally found all the states of an earlier book when a new one pops up somewhere, which is a little frustrating, but on the other hand it makes the whole adventure more exciting because every time I see a pre-2013 book for sale, I have to check it out, see if it matches what I already have, etc. And sometimes the differences are very, very small, so it's hard to tell if I should count it as a different state or not. For example, there's one book I have where just the tissue paper color over the title page is different. Is this is new state? Very philosophical stuff
I'm glad people enjoy them. Getting all the pics together and finding the original release info is a bit of a pain, but writing the actual entries once I have everything in place is quite fun.
I've had some very brief exchanges with Jerad about this and I think that it's primarily experimentation. But the line is a little blurry! And some of it may have to do with being a startup small press (for example, there may have been times when initial demand only required a fraction of the the total planned run and so while maybe all the book blocks were produced, not all of them were bound; when the remaining copies were bound, he might have tried different materials).
Experimentation doesn't always have the best results, so I know that there are a handful of books that were printed and bound but that didn't turn out like he wanted, so a few copies were sold but many or most were rebound (The Nightwalker is one of these). There are also editions that were intentionally given different treatments (Medusa and The Fog for example).
My last guess is that there also might have been, at times, different printers/binders involved for a single release, introducing slight differences. This is purely speculation, though!
If you are on Facebook and like Centipede Press, come join our new group - just search Centipede Press Collectors Group.
Cheers!
Looking To Buy:
Wandering Star:
Savage Tales Of Solomon Kane - leather
SubPress:
Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon - Letter V ( will trade for PC +cash)
Neal Stephenson’ Cryptomonicon and Zodiac - Letter O
My Book Collection