The Forgotten Planet and the Binding I Almost Claimed
What a loupe, a fold test, and a healthy respect for base rates settled once the book arrived
I bought a copy of Murray Leinster's The Forgotten Planet (Gnome Press, 1954) on eBay before it shipped, and I started working the binding identification from the listing photos alone, because the puzzle itself was worth the time. A copy described generically as “Gnome Press first, VG or VG” could be sitting on any of four documented binding states, and those states span from genuinely common to a binding the field's own specialist has never laid eyes on. The copyright page is no help. It says “First Edition” on all four. The whole question comes down to covering material, covering color, and lettering color, and I wanted to see how far I could get before the book was even in my hands.
Currey records four bindings for this title, and his own priority language is careful in a way that matters: “four bindings, first two probably as listed, last two later.” That's (A) cream cloth lettered in yellow-green, the copy deposited at the Library of Congress; (B) cream boards with a yellow-green marbled pattern lettered in green; (C) tan boards lettered in green; and (D) gray cloth lettered in red. Currey commits to A coming before B. He does not commit to C coming before D, only that both are later than the first pair. That distinction turned out to matter more than I expected once I started writing this up.
The binding that gives the post its stakes is A. Bill Carper, who has handled more Gnome Press material than almost anyone alive and maintains the standing bibliography at gnomepress.com, says flatly that he has never seen a copy, an image of one, or even a secondhand mention of one in the wild. If A is a true variant and not a cataloging ghost, it is effectively unobtainable. That is exactly the kind of fact that makes a collector want to find it anyway, and exactly the kind of fact that should make a careful one suspicious of any copy that seems to fit.
Working it from the photos
Before the book arrived, the identification came down to two questions: what color is the lettering, and is the covering cloth or boards. Green or yellow-green lettering points to the A, B, C, or later green-boards family; red lettering points only to D. Aged red tones toward brown or orange, it does not shift toward green, so a confident green read already rules out a degraded D misidentification. The listing photos read green. That left the harder question standing: cloth, which would mean the essentially unobtainable A, or boards, which would mean the common B or C.
Substrate color, cream versus tan, is the traditional way to separate B from C, but it is close to useless on a 70-year-old copy. Both tone toward a grayish buff with age and converge on each other, especially in photos. The more reliable read is texture and finish: true cloth scatters light and reads matte, where coated, embossed paper has a filmier, smoother sheen. The reflectance in the listing photos leaned toward paper. That was a data point, not a verdict, since photographs and lighting angle can mislead on this specific test.
What the loupe showed
With the book in hand, I could finally run the tests that photos can't support. Under the loupe, the weave read as too mechanically regular to be true cloth: real woven cloth has slightly irregular, interlaced threads, where this covering showed a fixed, repeating grain pattern, the tell for die-embossed paper rather than woven fabric. The wear at the corners and spine ends confirmed it. Cloth fails by fraying, lifting fuzzy thread ends; this covering showed scuffing and small cracks instead, consistent with a coated paper substrate cracking under stress rather than fabric giving way. The fold at the hinge crazed slightly rather than creasing softly, another paper tell. Every test lined up on the same answer: boards, not cloth.
That rules out A on physical grounds, which leaves B or C. The lettering is green rather than the marbled yellow-green-on-cream pattern Currey describes for B, and the substrate reads tan rather than cream in the areas protected from light, under the jacket flaps and at the turn-ins, which tone less than exposed boards. That combination, tan boards with green lettering, is Currey's binding C.
Why the reasoning matters more than the answer
Carper has never seen an A. That single fact sets an enormous prior against any given green-lettered copy actually being one. Every observation I made from the listing photos, and every test I ran once the book arrived, was consistent with C. None of them required A. That's the bar that matters: consistency with the rare state is not evidence for the rare state, it just means the rare state hasn't been ruled out yet. “Unrecorded variant” and “the one nobody's seen” are the two most seductive labels in this hobby, and they are almost always wrong. An imperfect match to a catalogued binding is usually just that binding showing its age, not a new discovery.
So the honest identification is C: tan boards, lettered in green, a legitimate and citable early-1954 Gnome Press state, not the gray cloth D that circulates most freely, and not the near-mythical cream cloth A that would have made this a very different post. I want to flag one piece of nuance here rather than overstate it. Currey's own language only establishes that C and D come after A and B; it doesn't establish that C precedes D.
One more thing to check on any copy
Two distinct dust jackets exist for this title. The standard jacket carries a map design across all the trade bindings. A second, far scarcer jacket depicting a man confronted by a giant scarab beetle was prepared for a short-lived Gnome Press juvenile imprint experiment and turns up only occasionally, sometimes on the very same tan-boards binding described here. A beetle jacket doesn't change the binding identification, but it's a significant value driver on its own and worth checking for regardless of which binding state you're holding.
For the fuller Gnome Press story, including how titles like this one ended up with multiple binding states in the first place, see our post The Legacy of the Gnome: A History of Gnome Press (1948–1962).
The Legacy of the Gnome: A History of Gnome Press (1948–1962)
Browse our current Gnome Press inventory here.
