While taking a tour through the forgotten chambers where our inventory is stored, our shippers ran across small caches of various titles. In a number of cases, we have single digits of these titles, so please get your order in soon, and it’s one copy per book per customer.

The found titles include:

– The Women of Nell Gwynne’s (Kage Baker);
– Bone and Jewel Creatures (Elizabeth Bear);
– Where Everything Ends (Ray Bradbury):
– Locke and Key: Welcome to Lovecraft (signed limited edition, Joe Hill);
– A Fantasy Medley (edited by Yanni Kuznia);
– Fevre Dream (George R. R. Martin);
– The Steel Remains (Richard Morgan);
– The Other Teddy Roosevelts (Mike Resnick);
– The Taborin Scale (Lucius Shepard);
– The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (Connie Willis).

If you’re signed up for our email newsletter you’ll want to pay special attention for the next three to four weeks. Keeping an eye on our news page might also be a good idea.

We have three enormously important titles to announce in the coming weeks, books we’ve been working on, in one case, for ten years.

Thomas Ligotti was kind enough to drop us a quick note to let us know how pleased he was with the definitive edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer.

Anyway, I think the book looks great. It also feels great: The pages are both smooth and sturdy and are a pleasure to turn. Aeron Alfrey’s cover looks way better as a dust jacket than I thought it would after seeing only the paperback. I didn’t expect less from you after the edition you did of The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, but this is obviously a special book to me and you did a job to be proud of. Thanks a million, Bill.

For those interested, we’re down to the last 35 or so copies of the trade hardcover of Songs.

We’re doing our best to keep up our insane publishing pace in 2010, with two new titles sent to the printer this week. First up is Dan Simmons’s masterful new novel, Black Hills, which is drawing rave reviews from the likes of Publishers Weekly, which had this to say in its starred review: “In his ability to create complex characters and pair them with suspenseful situations, Simmons stands almost unmatched among his contemporaries.”

Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Ammonite Violin & Others is also safely ensconced at the printer. We can’t share a couple of glowing reviews this title received just yet, but we can tell you that the limited edition with bonus chapbook is already sold out, and the trade edition is selling as quickly as any title we’ve ever published by Caitlin. As the book amounts to 80,000 words of ultra-obscure top level work by Cait, we’re not surprised. This one is unlikely to be in print long past its publication date.

Update: The Martian Chronicles is now out of print. Thank you everyone for making this project such a success.

Shipping of Ray Bradbury’s massive, The Martian Chronicles is going a bit more slowly than we had hoped. As of today, roughly half of the orders have gone out the door. Stock on the book is also dwindling very quickly. Our regular specialty dealers received very limited quantities of this mammoth collection, so it isn’t likely there will be a glut of copies available on the secondary market. If you’ve been putting off purchasing a copy, you shouldn’t hold off much longer.

Back to shipping news. We’re bringing in extra shipping help to finish Chronicles off, so we hope to be done early next week, at which point we’ll turn our attention to Norman Partridge’s Lesser Demons and Daniel Abraham’s Leviathan Wept and Other Stories. Looming on the horizon is Patrick Rothfuss’s The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle, which is at our printer, complete, and awaiting pickup. We have well over 2000 individual orders to ship for that title.

Here’s Tomislav Tikulin’s cover to Peter F. Hamilton’s enormous (930 pages) space opera, The Neutronium Alchemist, which is part two of his Night’s Dawn Trilogy.

Everything on Neutronium is right on schedule for publication this fall. The book has been completely designed and proofread, and we’re sending out to have ARCs printed. All that remains is for us to get the signature pages to the author to sign. After that, we plan to begin work on volume three, The Naked God. It also looks as though we’ll be doing a fourth volume, this one gathering all of the short stories contained in Another Chance at Eden, as well as the associated Confederation Handbook.

If that’s not enough Peter Hamilton for you, we’re also talking about another project we’ll be able to announce as soon as contracts are signed.

Work is progressing nicely on Hellcats and Honeygirls, the hardcover omnibus of vintage paperbacks co-authored by Lawrence Block and Donald E. Westlake. Here you can see Glen Orbik’s depiction of the trio of novels (A Girl Called Honey, So Willing, and Sin Hellcat) that make up this generous, 400 page volume.

These novels don’t represent the mystery grandmasters at their best, of course, but they’re a fascinating peek into the publishing landscape of quick penname paperbackery of fifty years’ past, and damned entertaining to boot. Now’s as good a time as any to let you know that we’ve spent the past month reading even more of Larry Block’s pseudonymous novels for at least one, and likely two, future volumes that feature this aspect of his literary career.

We’re running just a little behind in our release of Clementine, one of Cherie Priest’s sequels to her breakout novel, Boneshaker. The previous art just didn’t quite catch the flavor of the novel — which I hasten to add was our fault and not the artist’s, who did everything that was asked of him. So we decided to have Jon Foster give the cover a go, and here’s a somewhat rough version of the result, complete with oversize pirate airman, and one serious armament.

Boneshaker brought Cherie a much larger readership. Clementine will have a much smaller printing than either Boneshaker or its other sequel, Dreadnought, due out later in 2010. Please consider getting your order in for the trade edition now — the limited is already sold out.

While the shippers at our main warehouse continue to plug away at getting copies of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles out to customers, the satellite shipping at our main offices will be working on Neil Gaiman’s Melinda.

Beyond those two titles, we also have three great collections on the tarmac: Hard-Luck Diggings (Jack Vance), Lesser Demons (Norman Partridge), and Leviathan Wept and Other Stories (Daniel Abraham). We’ll keep everyone posted as we make progress.

While clearing out dozens of boxes of old Advance Reading Copies from one of the SubPress basements, we stumbled across a title we thought long out of print. Philip Jose Farmer’s Pearls from Peoria remains not only the longest Farmer title we’ve published (at over 770 pages), but also the most popular. And we have 24 copies of the second trade printing in perfect condition.

If you missed this one the first time around, snag a copy and marvel at the wide variety in the 60+ pieces of fiction and non-fiction that caused Publishers Weekly to give it a starred review: “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 Jose 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.”