Comments for: Skeleton Crew - S/L

From the catalog regarding the S/L Skeleton Crew: "Scream Press underestimated production costs and instead of making a name for themselves, went bankrupt."

I suppose the source of this info is George Beahm in his book Stephen King Collectibles. He doesn't quote his source for this information and it just seems to be accepted as fact and repeated on other websites, including this one. Perhaps it is just my nature to question statements like this (or perhaps my profession has taught me to be skeptical of unsubstantiated statements). And, maybe, it just doesn't make a bit of difference to anyone but me. But I don't think the S/L of Skeleton Crew is the sole reason Scream/Press folded. Scream/Press started taking orders for this book in late 1984 and the book was in the warehouse ready to ship to customers in April, 1986 (I have an S/P newsletter with that date showing a picture of Conner with the books stacked behind him). That isn't overly long for a small press publisher from start to finish. I'm not privy to any of the financial details but one of the explanatory letters I got during the wait (July 1985) was the inclusion of the full color J.K. Potter poster. I also know that it had to be reprinted at least once and one of the book's signatures had to be reprinted as well.

Scream/Press continued to operate until at least 1991 publishing several subsequent books. The ones I am most familiar with were the S/L editions of Barker's Books of Blood. The first three "books" were included in one volume. BoB volumes IV, V, and VI were subjected to numerous delays (mostly due to printers' errors) and volume VI was not delivered to me until 1991 (three years after I received volume V!).

And then, of course, there was the disastrous S/L of Rice's Interview With The Vampire in which they solicited orders as early as October, 1988 and completely failed to deliver leaving many, many irate customers in their wake.

I suspect only Jeff Conner ("Mr. Publisher") and Mimi Duncan ("Order Czar" and/or "Ministress of Information") know for sure but I suspect the failure of Scream/Press was due to a combination of suspect management (albeit well intentioned, I'm sure), hazards of running a small business and the usual unavoidable problems with printers, slipcase makers, etc. over a period of years. Since Scream/Press didn't officially fold until 1991 (I received a book from them that year) I think it is suspect to say that underestimating production costs for a single book Skeleton Crew (circa 1985) caused their bankruptcy doesn't seem correct. I think this is another of those examples where some unsubstantiated statement with no source attributed gets repeated as fact over and over again with no one questioning the validity.

Originally Posted by Bev Vincent

For posterity, here's a "recent" interview (2012) that Brian Freeman conducted with Jeff Conner

I looked at the interview using Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, and IE. It seems like the right ~1/3 is cut off. When I copy/paste it into a Word document the entire text is there. Weird. Perhaps we can get CD/Brian Freeman's permission to quote the entire interview.