Centipedes and Millipedes
Small presses devoted to genre fiction are hot right now. There’s even a website, the CollectibleBookVault, that tracks prices and provides basic bibliographies of a few publishers. These publishers are in the mold of the Limited Editions Club, mostly producing small runs of books using commercial printers and binders. I recently offered some Suntup Press books as well as books from Tom Garner’s lifetime subscription to the Subterranean Press. Now I have two dozen books from Tom’s Centipede Press collection on this week’s new arrivals list.
Centipede Press is the brainchild of Jerad Walters, who began making his own books and magazines in the 4th grade and never stopped. Early on, the print runs were small, often 200 copies or fewer. There are a number of Centipede Press completists out there, and other collectors who like particular genres. Tom Garner bought Walters’s first small press publication when it was called Cocytus Press as well as the first book from Centipede Press, ’Salem’s Lot by Stephen King (both versions sold from my Stephen King list). He also acquired some Millipede Press titles, a short-lived offshoot from the main series.
New Arrivals List 131: Centipede Press is now live on my website.
A Nice Story About the Power of Bookstores
I Thought I’d Love Being a Congressman. I Prefer Owning a Bookshop [hopefully not Paywalled at the Wall Street Journal]
Previous Dispatch Update—Spice Spice Baby
Back in 2023 I asked if To Kill a Mockingbird was still the most valuable novel of the 1960s from a collecting standpoint. I wrote about how first editions of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, which have crossed $20,0001 in nice condition, seemed to be gaining on Harper Lee’s beloved book. I also listed a few other books that might contend for the crown, including Dune, by Frank Herbert.
I noted that, “The price of Dune has definitely increased in recent years, tied to the new film version. Like TKAM and DADOES, it has an inherent vice that makes fine copies scarce: the dust jacket spine inevitably fades... The blockbuster films and the tech money flowing into first editions of science fiction classics right now may eventually push Androids and Dune above Mockingbird.”
On May 8, 2025, someone paid $75,000 for a very nice signed copy of Dune, a price exceeding the auction records for both To Kill a Mockingbird and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Similar copies of TKAM and DADOES might well sell for more because near fine signed copies are rare, but until they do, we have a new king of the 1960s novel. As Frank Herbert wrote, “Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind.”
Previous Dispatch Update—What’s the Point (Again)
I know there are only about six people who care about this, so feel free to stop reading now.
I’m returning yet again to the question of the two versions of the dust jacket for Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. The subject is both incredibly pedantic and also central to book collecting, which at its core attempts to take significant books back to their origins to understand their publishing history. Usually, that’s not especially hard. Sometimes the facts are maddeningly elusive.
Almost every copy of All the Pretty Horses has five blurbs (“APH5”) on the back of the jacket, but copies with only four blurbs (“APH4”) have been reported in the book trade and in collecting circles for more than twenty years. One possibility, given the number of faked Cormac McCarthy books in circulation, is that the jackets are forgeries, invented to make money from gullible collectors.
The collector Umberto La Rocca has researched the issue and interviewed people involved in the production of the book. While there are forgeries of APH4, the publisher definitely ordered four-blurb jackets from the printer. However, there is as yet no conclusive evidence that they were actually released to the public.
La Rocca, in his online bibliography of McCarthy’s work, “The McCarthyist”, is calling APH4 a “first state” jacket. He calls APH5 the “first issue.” I won’t revisit states vs. issues again (you can here, if you like) but I am not aware of any previous bibliographer using the terms in this way.
Based on La Rocca’s evidence, I think APH4 is most likely a trial jacket, one produced but never used. Normally, trial issues are made in small numbers, as tests or proofs of concept. In the case of APH4 it seems that the publisher probably ordered 25,000-odd jackets for the first edition and then didn’t use them. Most of the jackets were likely pulped but a few were sent to the publisher or retained in the printer’s files and from there seem to have leaked onto the collector’s market. That, to me, is the most likely scenario.
In the process of looking into APH4, I considered another jacket variant well-known among collectors, the ’Salem’s Lot jacket priced at $8.95 with the “Father Cody” error on the front flap. First printings of Stephen King’s novel in that jacket currently command north of $100,000 on the collector’s market. These are usually referred to as “first state” jackets by collectors. But they aren’t. They, too, are trial jackets because they were never commercially released to the public. Unused $8.95/Father Cody jackets were found in the art department files at the publisher and married to first printing books. The story, backed by transcripts of memos from Doubleday’s files, can be found in the Cemetery Dance edition of King’s novel.
Just because these $8.95/Father Cody jackets2 aren’t “first state” jackets doesn’t mean they aren’t cool or collectible, but they are a kind of frankenbook, invented after the fact by collectors and dealers and not by Stephen King or his publisher.
—Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books
A large Internet seller that doesn’t deal much in rare books recently sold a copy on AbeBooks for $15,000.
In case you are about to check your copy of ’Salem’s Lot, remember, the front jacket flap needs to have both an $8.95 price and a reference to Father Cody. The publisher reduced the price at the last minute, lowering it to $7.95. The printer accomplished this by clipping the jackets and adding a new price. Soon an error was found—the character Father Callahan was referred to as Father Cody on the front flap (Cody was the surname of an attorney character). Jackets were reprinted correcting both the price and the priest’s name. Later, the publisher increased the price to $8.95, but those jackets correctly refer to Father Callahan. If you have a copy with an $8.95 price, that’s probably what you have.