Three brand new lettered editions are in our offices, and shipping right now: Ghost of Albion - Initiation (Amber Benson & Christopher Golden); The Spirit Box (Stephen Gallagher); Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales (Norman Partridge);

Next up are Lords of the Razor (Joe R. Lansdale) and Harp of the Grey Rose (Charles de Lint).

At last! We’ve sent the nearly 1200 page, two volume limited edition of George R. R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords to the printer. ASoS contains nearly 70 black and white illustrations by Charles Vess, including endpapers, full page and copious vignettes, plus four full-color, full page paintings. ASoS will truly be a book for those who love epic tales, and beautiful books. This one half killed everyone involved, but we think the results will be worth it.

At this point, we expect to have finished books in our offices in 4-5 weeks, at which time it will take 4-5 weeks beyond that to have the slipcases made. Come August, it’s going to be a great time to be a George R. R. Martin fan!

David Pitt of Booklist shed his kindly eye on Retro Pulp Tales, and we’re most pleased with the results: “The movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was contemporary pulp fiction that felt as though it was made decades ago. So, too, are the stories in this exciting new collection of “retro pulp.” The contributors, including F. Paul Wilson and Bill Crider, were asked to write a story that could have appeared in the pulps, and they have succeeded spectacularly. The first story, for example, James Reasoner’s “Devil Wings over France,” catapults the reader back to an era when thrillers and speculative fiction coexisted happily. These aren’t parodies or even homages. They’re straight-up pulp fiction, energetically written and remarkably faithful to the genre.”

Caitlin R. Kiernan’s dark fantasy narrative, Alabaster, continues to pre-sell very well. We don’t expect to have any copies of the $45 Limited Edition for sale post-publication. Look for brisk sales of the $25 trade edition as well, if this review in Publishers Weekly is any indication: “Dancy Flammarion, an albino adolescent who speaks to angels and slays monsters in human guise in the backwoods of contemporary Georgia, is the heroine of the five interlocking stories that make up this eerie dark fantasy collection… Kiernan imbues the tales with disquieting gothic imagery and envelops them in rich, evocative prose that conveys cohesiveness beyond their fragmentary plots.”

Philip Jose Farmer’s massive (300,000 word) compendium of uncollected fiction and non-fiction, Pearls from Peoria, has just received a coveted starred review from Publishers Weekly: “This colossal scrapbook of scarce, offbeat fiction, poetry and nonfiction from SF veteran Farmer offers fans a smorgasbord of his hard—and impossible—to find work from fanzines and other small publications, spanning the 1940s to the 1990s. Amassed by Mike Croteau, who runs the official Philip José Farmer Web site, and edited by Paul Spiteri, who provides brief introductions for each piece, this collection is especially valuable for its insights into the author’s writing methods. For fun, Farmer reinterpreted the adventures of pulp hero Doc Savage, Oz characters, Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan. His canine detective, Ralph von Wau Wau, in “A Scarletin Study,” somehow blended Holmes, Sam Spade and, typically, puns. Farmer also reprised vampire, werewolf and Frankenstein stories. About the sale of his first story, “The Lovers” (which won a Hugo in 1952), Farmer says in the autobiographical “Maps and Spasms” that he thought he “had the world by the tail. But, as it turned out, there was a tiger at the other end.” Fortunately for generations of SF readers, he persisted.”

The esteemed website Infinity Plus weighs in on Terry Lamsley’s two novella collection, Made Ready & Cupboard Love: “The appearance of the long-awaited new collection by Terry Lamsley is a special treat for the countless dark fiction lovers who, having greatly enjoyed the excellent award-winning Under the Crust, Conference with the Dead and Dark Matters, were eager for more material by this gifted writer… Equal to Lamsley’s compelling, previous production, ‘Made Ready’ confirms the writer’s exceptional talent in creating dark tales capable of chilling and unsettling without ever resorting to gore or violence. That’s how good horror fiction should always be.”

We’re down to our last few dozen copies of Thomas Ligotti’s The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, which contains more than 100,000 words of the horror-master’s best tales. At only 400 signed numbered copies, this one is likely to go up in value once it’s sold out.

We’ve just announced four brand new limited editions, each of them turned in and already on our production schedules. Authors include long-time SubPress favorite Joe R. Lansdale (Lost Echoes), noted horror scribes Stephen Gallagher (The Painted Bride) and Peter Crowther (The Spaces Between the Lines), as well as hot newcomer Kealan Patrick Burke (Currency of Souls).

None of these new titles has a print run higher than 750 copies — the Lansdale, in fact, is limited to only 415 copies. Two things to note: the image above is Edward Miller’s wonderful cover for Steve Gallagher’s novel, and we’ve posted an extensive excerpt from Kealan’s novel on the book’s page.

Mark Graham of The Rocky Mountain News has this to say about Joe R. Lansdale’s Lords of the Razor:

Whether you’re an avid reader or a dedicated book collector, $100 is a lot to pay for a book. On the other hand, with the average price for an “ordinary” hardcover edition averaging between $25 and $30 these days, occasionally such an expenditure might be justified.

Consider a book that contains original stories unavailable in any other form by top names in the supernatural-horror field, all wrapped in a finally crafted tome, housed in a custom slipcase and signed by the authors. One might regard such a purchase an investment - a venture not necessarily less risky than the stock exchange but certainly one more enjoyable.
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