After hearing from many customers who missed out on preordering China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, we decided to increase the print run to 350 copies, which remains less than the expected demand, and smaller than any Mieville limited we’ve ever done.

We’ve spoken with the artist, Edward Miller, and in addition to the exclusive illustrations we’ve commissioned, our edition will include the original Perdido dust jacket art as a frontispiece, and the six full-color plates created for the proposed Night Shade edition. This means our edition will have nine full-color interior illustrations, one of them a gatefold pull-out, as well as a brand new wraparound dust jacket.

One final thing — we’ve decided to extend the special $100 preorder price on Perdido until August 31.

Jay Lake’s hefty (over 400 pages) collection, The Sky That Wraps, is at our printer, awaiting pickup as soon as our new warehouse is up and running.

Just at the right time, we have a new review to share, this one from San Francisco Book Review: “Jay Lake is a first-class wordsmith, an author who relishes the possibilities of language, utilizing words to their utmost to craft incredibly detailed worlds both hauntingly familiar and mind-bogglingly different. From a desolate prison to dense cityscapes, from rooftops to cemeteries, from Shakespeare in space to ghosts in small-town Texas, The Sky That Wraps meanders along the creative spectrum, lovingly realized with linguistic aplomb.”

We’re in the run up to sending the omnibus of Lawrence Block and Donald E. Westlake’s three collaborative novels, under the overall title Hellcats and Honeygirls, to the printer, and have just received the first review, from Publishers Weekly, who took the book in the spirit it was intended, and was very complimentary: “Block’s heartwarming introduction to this omnibus recounts their glee at killing off each other’s characters and admiration for each other’s great lines… Readers will need to set aside their modern sensibilities to appreciate the mastery underneath the wild, hilariously euphemistic, and questionably consensual sex, but these classics are undeniably worth the effort.”

We’re moving the SubPress stock this week, trucking over 40,000 lbs worth of books an hour south to a new home that’s a mere five minutes from my house, and even closer to SubPress Director of Production Yanni Kuznia. Shipping will likely be a bit disrupted for the next week-and-a-half to two weeks, though we’ll do our best to minimize the hassle to everyone.

For those who collect weird bits of information, the first two SubPress titles, shipped out of the apartment that Tim Holt and I shared, back in 1995, were the chapbooks Spyder (Norman Partridge) and Out There in the Darkness (Ed Gorman). We’ve come a long way from shredding extra sheets of paper and doing all of the packing at the dining room table.

The first title likely to ship from our new warehouse is Peter Straub’s The Juniper Tree and Other Blue Rose Stories. We’re down to the last copies of the limited edition, and thanks to a starred review in Publishers Weekly, the trade edition is selling briskly as well. Juniper is one of the most potent, unflinching collections we’ve ever published. If you’re interested in exploring what the best horror fiction can do, it’s a great place to start.

New features have been piling up over at the Summer issue of Subterranean Online, including Notes from the Underworld, the first installment in a new column by Kelley Armstrong, whose upcoming novella, Counterfeit Magic, is well on the way to becoming the best pre-selling title in SubPress history.

Also of note is a long (30,000 words) novella by Mike Resnick. “Six Blind Men and an Alien“, like his classic “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” (published in an earlier issue of the magazine) offers up a number of perspectives on a singular find, which add up to something that’s part puzzle, part story.

We’ve just heard from China Miéville that the signature pages for Kraken should arrive at our office any day. As soon as they do, we’ll package everything off, and China’s epic (over 600 pages) romp through a London that (we hope) doesn’t quite exist will be sent to the printer.

Speaking of Kraken, Michael Berry just had some terribly kind things to say about it in the San Francisco Chronicle, including: “Kraken finds Miéville, the author of The Scar and The City & The City in a more playful mood than usual. There’s plenty in the novel that’s grotesque and frightening, particularly an exquisitely creepy pair of killers known as Goss and Subby… The reader is primed for a memorable payoff, and Miéville more than delivers.”

You can add TWO Jim Butcher Lettered Editions to the dozen titles we’ve shipped recently. Both Grave Peril and Fool Moon are packed up and ready to be sent out UPS in the next couple of days.

Please note that there are lettered copies of both Fool Moon and Grave Peril still available.

We’re already hard at work on the next Dresden Files limited, Summer Knight. Look for ordering info soon.

We’re hard at work on the signed limited edition of China Mieville’s beloved Perdido Street Station. A copy of the trade paperback is out being scanned, and will be designed and proofed in roughly two months. This fall, Edward Miller plans to create an original wraparound cover as well as a pull-out illustration for our edition. Perdido will also contain the original UK cover as a frontispiece.

We’ve received a number of queries from customers who paid Night Shade Books for their proposed edition to see if we’ll be honoring those purchases, or able to guarantee them a lettered edition if they have already purchased one through Night Shade. (We won’t be able to.) Our edition is in no way affiliated with Night Shade Books. Customers should contact them for resolution if they placed an order.

Just a few quick notes about Peter V. Brett’s upcoming novella, Brayan’s Gold, set in the same universe as his epic fantasy novels The Warded Man and The Desert Spear.

Pete has yet to announce the book on his blog, and the limited edition is already in danger of selling out. After consulting with him, we have decided to increase the limitation to 750 copies, to give his most ardent fans a crack at the signed version. Even so, we expect once Pete has the chance to blog about it, this version will sell out quickly.

We’ve seen the cover rough by Lauren K. Cannon, who also plans 9 black-and-white interior illustrations, and think everyone is going to be pleased with the finished book. Brayan’s Gold is the perfect side-tale to satisfy readers in between Peter’s full-length novels.

This month’s issue of Library Journal brings strong reviews of a couple of SubPress titles.

First up is Peter S. Beagle’s Return, which marks his, well, return, to the setting of The Inkeeper’s Song. As LJ notes, “Beagle’s obvious gifts as a storyteller and master stylist shine in this small tale that is large in meaning and mastery.”

Not to be outdone is one of our favorites among the newest batch of epic fantasists, K. J. Parker, whose novella Blue and Gold also fared well: “The author of ‘The Engineer Trilogy’ has written a mesmerizing short novel that combines fictional autobiography with political intrigue and the art of the confidence man… History rewrites itself at every turn in this tale of an alchemist whose own base metal becomes, at last, pure gold.”