Fantasy Press Signed Copies: Reading the Autograph Leaf
The signed and numbered limited edition is so ordinary now that it is easy to forget somebody had to invent it. Lloyd Arthur Eshbach did, at Fantasy Press, and he did it for an unromantic reason: he needed advance capital to fund the press. Chalker and Owings are explicit that this is where the practice began. Arkham House and Shasta signed small numbers of copies for direct customers, but they were not issuing limited numbered editions in this way. Fantasy Press was.
Knowing how the system worked tells you most of what you need to judge a copy.
The mechanics
A signed Fantasy Press copy is the ordinary trade binding with an extra leaf added. The autograph page was tipped or bound in, signed by the author, and numbered. The binding itself is not a distinguishing feature, which is the first thing that catches people out. You cannot tell a signed copy from a trade copy by looking at the outside.
The fastest physical tell is the paper. Those autograph pages were usually printed on slick magazine stock, noticeably different from the paper used for the rest of the book. If you are looking at photographs and the leaf looks different from the book’s other pages, that’s a tell that it’s the limited edition.
The number is on the leaf, so read it
This is where a lot of listings go wrong. There is no single house limitation figure for Fantasy Press. Chalker and Owings give the range as never fewer than 300 and never more than 500, with the limitation for each individual title stated on the autograph page itself.
So "Fantasy Press limited edition, one of 500" is a claim to check rather than a fact to assume. The book tells you. Anyone quoting a number without reference to the leaf is quoting a habit.
There were occasional overruns. When that happened the extra copies above the stated limitation were lettered rather than numbered, and Chalker and Owings say plainly that lettered copies have no other significance. They are not scarcer in any meaningful sense and they do not carry a premium. If a seller is asking more for a lettered copy, that is a preference, not a point.
Inscriptions are evidence, not damage
Autograph leaves were often inscribed to the subscriber by name, because these were sold to people who bought them regularly. Those regulars tended to hold the same number from book to book, and the inscriptions from prolific authors like E.E. Smith grew warmer and more personal across the years.
That matters for how you read a copy. A named inscription on a Fantasy Press autograph leaf is not a previous owner defacing a book. It is the subscription system working as designed, and on the right copy it is a provenance trail.
The strangest thing in the file
Two books are Gnome Press first editions carrying a Fantasy Press imprint, because Eshbach printed the overrun.
Currey records that Invaders from the Infinite exists in two issues. The trade issue has the Gnome Press imprint. The limited issue has a title page reading Reading, Penna.: Fantasy Press, and consists of 112 signed copies, issued without a dust jacket. It also carries the standard Fantasy Press limitation notice, which in this case is simply wrong: it states a limitation of 3,000 copies of which 300 are numbered and autographed, for a book that exists in 112.
The Vortex Blaster has the same shape. Two issues, the second with a Fantasy Press imprint. On this one Currey quotes Eshbach directly, from a letter dated 19 May 1975: "When I printed the overrun of the Gnome Press edition with FP imprint, I shot for 100. There were a few extras."
That is the publisher, twenty-odd years later, telling a bibliographer roughly how many he made because nobody wrote it down at the time. It is also a warning about the limitation notice generally. The notice is boilerplate. The leaf, and the count on it, is the evidence.
What to ask before you buy
Is the autograph leaf physically present, and is it tipped in or bound in. What number does it carry, and what limitation does it state. Is it numbered or lettered. And on a Gnome Press title of the early 1960s, which imprint is on the title page, because the answer occasionally is not the one on the spine.
We confirm the leaf before we price anything as limited, and we say when we cannot. You can see what we currently have on the Fantasy Press shelf.
