A variety of interesting chapbooks came in, including two books about H. P. Lovecraft’s family and a few Swanwick chapbooks I hadn’t been able to pick up before:
Posts Tagged ‘chapbooks’
Library Additions: Chapbooks By Swanwick, Mieville, Lovecraft
Thursday, October 9th, 2014Library Additions: Three Interesting Chapbooks
Thursday, September 11th, 2014I recently got in three interesting trim-sized chapbooks, two hardback and two signed:
One other thing these have in common: I’ll have copies for all three available through Lame Excuse Books (inquire if you want one).
Library Addition: A [Gene] Wolfe Family Album
Tuesday, December 10th, 2013I’ve been busy and have gotten slightly behind in cataloging books that have come in. In the interests “some content is better than no content,” I’m going to catalog the more interesting ones one at a time until I catch up with the backlog.
Up first: One of the few Gene Wolfe chapbooks I didn’t already own:
Wolfe, Gene. A Wolfe Family Album. United Mythologies Press, 1991. First edition chapbook original, a Fine copy. Signed by Gene Wolfe. Chapbook of mostly Wolfe family photos, evidently issued with the hardback edition of Letters Home (which I’ve owned for some time, but which didn’t come with the chapbooks when I bought it).
Library Additions: Three Interesting Ray Bradbury Chapbooks
Monday, August 5th, 2013I recently picked up three Ray Bradbury chapbooks, two signed stapled chapbooks from Heritage Auctions, one bound in decorated boards from Half Price Books. One is pretty well documented as a first edition. However, the other two, being for the scholastic market, are not.
I’m not aware of a comprehensive Ray Bradbury bibliography out that, or I would no doubt own it. Does anyone know if The Veldt and Collected Short Stories are indeed first editions of those works or not, or how I would tell?
Avram Davidson Chapbooks
Thursday, May 23rd, 2013Since The Wailing of the Gaulish Dead just arrived in the mail, I thought I would do a post on all four of the Avram Davidson chapbooks put out by The Nutmeg Point District Mail/Avram Davidson Society:
Library Additions: Three Chapbooks
Monday, May 13th, 2013Three chapbooks, two (mostly) non-fiction, and one fiction round-robin to help complete my Joe R. Lansdale collection.
The coloration is actually even on the last two; the variation in the pics is a scanner artifact.
Two Jack Vance Rarities
Monday, March 18th, 2013I was recently able to pick up two rare Jack Vance first editions, one of them one of his most difficulty hardbacks, the other a recent chapbook not even my hardcore Jack Vance collecting friends had heard of.
Not in any standard online reference sources. I found it via a Google image search for “Jack Vance chapbooks”. I can’t help thinking that this is going to drive some Jack Vance completists absolutely bonkers.
Recent Library Acquisitions: 12 Volumes in the Stellar Publishing Science Fiction Series
Wednesday, June 20th, 2012I picked up an interesting lot in a recent Heritage auction: 12 of the 18 volumes in the Stellar Publishing Corporation Science Fiction Series. SF pioneer Hugo Gernsback formed Stellar Publishing Corporation in 1929, and I’m given to understand that many volumes were available for sale for decades in the back of various science fiction magazines.
Alas, there seems to be a dearth of information about Stellar Publishing itself out on the Internet. Fortunately, I have the very first science fiction bibliography ever published, Science Fiction Bibliography, VOL 1, NO 1 (and only), published by the “Science Fiction Syndicate” right here in Austin, Texas in 1935. Let’s see what it has to say about the series:
The titles and authors of these eighteen booklets are too well known to enumerate.
Well, thanks a lot, long-dead dumbasses!
All of these (except the Manly Wade Wellman volume) can only be considered VG (at best) because the previous owner punched a set of small binding holes near the spine, presumably to store them all in one binder. Still, I only paid $38 for the entire set.
All of these have browned pages due to the paper used, but the scanner slightly exaggerates the shading variation. List numbers are the number each volume comes in the series.
- Michelmore, Reg. An Adventure in Venus. Stellar Publishing Corporation, 1929. First edition chapbook original, VG, with punch holes and usual page browning.
- Stone, Leslie F. When the Sun Went Out. Stellar Publishing Corporation, 1929. First edition chapbook original, VG, with punch holes and usual page browning.
- Lorraine, Lilith. The Brain of the Planet. Stellar Publishing Corporation, 1929. First edition chapbook original, VG-, with punch holes and usual page browning, and a few stray black marks to cover.
- Colladay, Morrison. When the Moon Fell. Stellar Publishing Corporation, 1929. First edition chapbook original, VG, with punch holes and usual page browning.
- Bourne, Frank/Long, Amelia Reynolds. The Thought Stealer (Bourne) and The Mechanical Man (Long). Stellar Publishing Corporation, 1930. First edition chapbook original, VG, with punch holes and usual page browning.
- Bradley, Jack. The Torch of Ra. Stellar Publishing Corporation, no date (1930). First edition chapbook original, VG, with punch holes and usual page browning.
- Eberle, Merab/Mitchell, Milton. The Thought Translator (Eberle) and The Creation (Mitchell). Stellar Publishing Corporation, 1930. First edition chapbook original, VG, with punch holes and usual page browning.
- Higginson, H. W. The Elixir. Stellar Publishing Corporation, 1930. First edition chapbook original, VG, with punch holes and usual page browning.
- Black, Pansy E. The Valley of the Great Ray. Stellar Publishing Corporation, 1930. First edition chapbook original, VG, with punch holes and usual page browning.
- Farrar, Clyde/Sharp, D.D. The Life Vapor (Farrar) and Thirty Miles Down. Stellar Publishing Corporation, no date (1930). First edition chapbook original, VG-, with punch holes and usual page browning, slight staining to top back corner near spine, and initials to very bottom of cover.
- Wellman, Manly Wade. The Invading Asteroid. Stellar Publishing Corporation, 1932. First edition chapbook original, a Near Fine copy with usual page browning (and unlike the above, no side hole punching).
Generally, the Wellman is (along with Clark Ashton Smith’s The Immortals of Mercury and Jack Williamson and Dr. Miles J. Breuer’s The Girl From Mars, neither of which I’ve picked up yet) considered among the more desirable titles in the series. But the Lorraine and Bourne/Long titles are also getting somewhat hard to find as well.
Gene Wolfe: Four Cheap Street Chapbooks
Sunday, August 14th, 2011One of my favorite authors is Gene Wolfe (which you might have noticed before), so naturally I’ve tried to collect all his books. This includes all his chapbooks, some of which can be quite difficult to find.
Among his hardest to find are the ones he did for Cheap Street. Over the years I have picked up four of the five pure chapbooks done by them (as well as the two hardback books, Empires of Flowers and Foliage and Bibliomen), but frequently I would have trouble remembering which of them I have, a difficulty not aided by rather bland exteriors of the chapbooks themselves and the fact that all came in a standard Cheap Street envelope when I bought them, none of which revealed what was inside.
So, for both the sake of Gene Wolfe collectors, and to jog my own memory, I’ve scanned the title pages of each of the ones I have (click to embiggen):
Or, to list them in order of publication:
I think I paid in the $35-$40 range for each of those.
Chalker and Owings says that seven copies of each of the above were done as leather-bound hardbacks. Not only do I not have those, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of them offered for sale.
As far as I can tell, I’m only missing two Wolfe chapbooks now:
I’ll have to add those to the want list.
I think I have a first edition hardback of every other Gene Wolfe book.
More about Cheap Street here.