Subterranean Press Featured Title

We’ve uncovered three copies of the signed edition of Stephen King’s The Green Mile, which was limited to only 148 numbered sets, with the first volume signed by Mr. King. (These are legit copies, not PC copies.)

If you’re interested, each set is $930, including US shipping. Limit one set per family or household. Drop us an email and we can work out payment arrangements if you’d like to pick up a gorgeous edition of one of Mr. King’s finest works.

SubPress favorite John Scalzi has posted a shareware chapbook to his website, “How I Proposed to My Wife: An Alien Sex Story,” which was originally published as a chapbook to accompany the hardcover of issue four of Subterranean magazine. Best of all, half of what John takes in is going to Lupus research, a disease which many of you know my wife suffers from. So please, check out the Scalzi story, send him a few bucks via the methods he has set up, laugh your ass off at the tale, and help a very worthy cause in the process.

We’ve put together over half of our 2009 schedule thus far, with titles by Ray Bradbury, Alastair Reynolds, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Naomi Novik, John Scalzi, and many other fine writers. Just as with 2008, we’ll be publishing in the neighborhood of 60 books, a goodly mix of limited and trade editions. Just this week, we’ve reached agreement to add a few new books to that list, including one (and possibly two) by Kage Baker, a brand new collection by Greg Egan, and The Dark Volume, Gordon Dahlquist’s stunning followup to his literary debut fantasy, The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters. Be looking for us to start putting up part of next year’s schedule late this summer and early fall.

We’ve just sent the next batch of titles to the printer, including

– The Jack Vance Reader (Jack Vance);
– Kull: Exile of Atlantis (Robert E. Howard);
– Project Moonbase and Others (Robert A. Heinlein).

Which join a number of titles already there, including:

– What the Mouse Found (Charles de Lint);
– Haggopian and Other Stories (Brian Lumley);
– Interworld (Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves);
– Black & White (Lewis Shiner).

Next week, our two deluxe chapbooks will be at the printer as well:

– Skeletons (Ray Bradbury);
– Yellow Dog (Charles de Lint).

As you can see, it’s shaping up to be a busy summer around here, with a wide variety of reading material for everyone’s tastes.

We’ve completed shipping all initial orders (individual, retail, and wholesale) orders for Something Wild is Loose (Robert Silverberg) and Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson). We wound up not filling a good number of wholesaler orders on the Stephenson title, to have copies to sell direct for a short while after publication.

While searching through the lowest levels of SubPress stock, in addition to a number of last copies now listed on Ebay, Tim uncovered a box with ten copies of the first printing of Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box. These are part of the 300 copy regular limited edition, which regularly sell for $400+ on Ebay. We’re offering them to folks for $300 per copy, plus shipping (limit one copy per family or household). All of the profits from the sales (after any paypal or credit card fees) will be going to The Hero Initiative, an organization created to be a safety net for comic creators.

Please drop us an email if you’re interested in purchasing a copy to help this very deserving charity, and let us know if you’d like to pay via PayPal or credit card.

Over at Subterranean Online, we’re delighted to bring to light a teleplay co-written by Robert A. Heinlein more than 50 years ago. Delilah and the Space Rigger, is based, of course, on the classic short story. For insight into the practical way in which Heinlein approached writing for the screen, we’re also printing John Scalzi’s introduction. Both of these pieces, and many more teleplays and screen treatments, will appear in Heinlein’s Project Moonbase and Others, which is heading to the printer this week.

Work progresses, but slowly, on Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s masterpiece, The Shadow of the Wind. At this point, the dust jacket is done, while we’ve approved roughs for all of the interior art. The sig pages are with Carlos, but it’s going to take him some time to get to them. His second adult novel, The Angel’s Game, has just been released in Spain with a first printing of one million copies, so Carlos is being kept very busy with promotional duties.

One final note. Our edition of The Shadow of the Wind will contain a secret feature, only to be discovered when readers receive their copy.

This may seem an oddly positive review to post an excerpt from, but here you go: “Although many of the stories are individually outstanding, the jumble of modern, historical and fanciful settings, traditional monsters and imagined threats make this feel more like an issue of a magazine than an anthology with a firm motif.”

If you’re looking for an anthology that covers a lot more ground than your usual theme anthology, then Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy might just be the book for you.

The Limited Edition of Robert E. Howard’s Kull: Exile of Atlantis is less than a week from heading to the printer. Our Director of Production, Yanni Kuznia, has been through the book and index multiple times, making corrections to the files we were sent. We’ve set up a special art/portfolio section for Justin Sweet’s full-color interior illustrations, as well as replacing a few of the black-and-white illustrations with new, improved versions by Justin. That’s not all. Justin has agreed to provide an extra section of rough sketches that will appear only in the Deluxe Leatherbound edition of Kull.

A few things to we should tell you. Our edition, the text, interior illustrations, and endsheets will be printed on a heavier paper than the Wandering Star editions, though we’ve decided on a color art portfolio rather than placing the color interior illustrations throughout the book. Also, as our printer is not able to do top edge gilding on the book, that’s one feature we’ll have to leave behind. We’ll be continuing the two-color foil stamping on the book itself, which will be bound in a beige Pearl Linen that stamps well, and will continue the Wandering Star tradition of having a full-color illustration adorn the slipcase.

We think, given the fact that we’ll be doing far fewer copies than Wandering Star did of their limited editions, and at a $75 lower price point, the SubPress editions of Robert E. Howard’s works will sit proudly on the shelves next to Wandering Star’s glorious volumes.