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EDITIONS OF
My captions to the collection of images of various editions of the first Discworld novel ended up by being rather longer than I expected, so I have put them together, and expanded them somewhat to provide a slightly more coherent thread, but inevitably it still reads rather jumpily to me. The illustration for the cover of our first edition was by Alan Smith, a young student at Brighton College of Art when we commissioned this picture. The book was typeset in the UK, but printed in the US for us through St Martin’s Press, as at that time printing costs were cheaper there than here, and there were only about 500 copies with our imprint. I only ordered a small quantity as in 1983 the principal purchasers were the public libraries, and due to budget cuts they had cut their purchases to about a tenth of what they had been a decade before. I sent them film for the jacket, but I did not like the blurb St Martin’s Press printed on it, so most copies of our edition have it covered over by a blurb more to my liking. Second-hand copies in mint condition now sell for about £750. While there was no reprint or bookclub edition of the UK edition, St Martin’s did licence it to Doubleday’s SF Book Club. There is very little difference between the two, and unless one knows the differences one is liable to buy the bookclub edition (of which there are something like 100,000 in print) while thinking one is buying the first US edition, of which there are only about 4,000. The most obvious difference is that the bookclub edition does not have gold blocking on the spine, and if you have a copy with a jacket, the Doubleday edition has the number 06199 on the back cover whereas the St Martin’s edition has their ISBN 0-312-15084-9, and the bookclub edition weighs about 280 gms as opposed to 395 gms for the true first US edition. The first time a Josh Kirby picture was used for one of Terry’s books was for the Corgi edition of Colour published in January 1985. He misread the text and took the schoolboy term for someone wearing glasses - four-eyes - to mean Twoflower had four eyes. As it was one of Josh’s rare water-colours he was unable to modify the picture. (He’d had this nice piece of suitable board lying around at the time and didn’t want to waste it.) Some years later, we discussed with Corgi how they could get Terry’s books bought by readers outside the genre market, and it was suggested that by producing an edition with a more neutral cover design so it would not look out of place in ‘General Fiction’ they might be able to do this. They had the support of W.H.Smith’s central buying organisation for this plan. The first trial version of the cover, featuring the Luggage painted by Chris Brown, was felt to be inappropriate, and a design by Stephen Player, of the Viritruvian Turtle (inspired by Leonardo’s Viritruvian Man)was felt to be suitable for the general fiction shelves, and if the experiment worked, then more Pratchett titles would be issued in two designs. Unfortunately the idea was not successful as most local managers continued to put the book in their SF/Horror section in spite of there being copies with both designs side by side. Only about 15,600 copies were sold, and Josh’s design continued to be used thereafter, but the book was reset in 1994, increasing the number of pages from 240 to 288. In 1989 I asked Terry to write a short Foreword about the Discworld for our new printing, which was to feature Josh’s picture on the cover. As soon as I got the Foreword it was typeset and immediately sent to the printers, and copies were on sale in the shops within a month of my getting Terry’s text. The first language into which Colour was translated was German, but typical of so many Germany publishers - and publishers in other countries - a decade or so ago, they never worried whether the cover design had any relevance to the book’s story. In this case Goldmann liked the idea of a beauty in a state of undress admiring her jewellery. Had it been used for The Light Fantastic, with special pleading there might have been some very slight connection with Bethan’s rescue, but not for Colour. In Britain I expect the use of such an irrelevant cover would have brought the publishers up against the Trade Descriptions Act. In Italy, the publishers Mondadori issued a monthly series entitled Urania Fantasy - this is not a translation from the Italian - the type being set two columns to a page, and Colour appeared as their April 1989 offering. As with Goldmann, this had a cover illustration that was barely relevant to its subject. Terry recognised it as a copy from a scene from the film Excalibur, with the Luggage added. It shows Rincewind in black robes and a handsome, armoured Twoflower. As a result of this and Heyne’s unusual policy about cover designs which we had just come across, we started putting a clause in Terry’s translation contracts stating that the foreign publisher either had to use Josh’s picture or get our approval of the one they were proposing to use so we could make sure that it was relevant to the story-line. Gollancz initially thought that foreign publishers would object to this, but in the event none did. However, things did not always run smoothly: for example, the Hebrew publishers Kinneret happily signed the agreement without complaint, but either had not read or chose to ignore this clause. Anyway, this design was the result: a wizard, a skull, two presumed demons staring out of an orifice, an observant bird and two mice. Lots of apologies and promises to get it right next time, which they did, I am glad to say. The Japanese edition has an attractive picture of the Discworld and the Great A’Tuin viewed from above as a frontispiece, a map and a picture of the iconograph, all in colour. It is a very small paperback, a mere 15cm high, but this is a standard Japanese book size. An even smaller book was Gollancz’s 1995 hardcover Compact Edition, which used a detail from the original Kirby design on its jacket. This and the other three Compact Editions, all with a page height of 8.7cm, were printed in China. The complications involved in producing these were the reason that no more volumes have been produced to date, but the small type is surprisingly legible. I see they are still being used as a special offer by the Fantasy and SF Bookclub. The odd pairing of Colour with Sourcery was due - so I was told - to the fact that initially Goldmann still had the rights in The Colour of Magic and Heyne only published it in 1992, so they published The Light Fantastic with Equal Rites in 1994. Their logic still escapes me: had they said that it was a purely commercial decision which ensured that if someone wanted to read Colour’s sequel, they would have to buy another volume, one would have believed them, but the reason given me really did not hold water. Although the contracts with Heyne required the cover design to be by Josh, we found that while they kept to the letter of the agreement their design department - working from another building and considered even by Heyne staff to be a law unto itself - still chose totally inappropriate pictures to use: for example a crucifixion scene for Strata. The wording was then tightened up in the next contract and stated that the picture had to be relevant to the book, and a penalty fee had to be paid if it wasn’t. In this case they used a Kirby illustration for one of Robert Rankin’s Brentford Trilogy titles. When I pointed out that a picture with a church, a Morris Minor and London policemen, even though there was a wizard in it, was hardly appropriate for a Discworld novel, and therefore the penalty was due, their reply was that as they thought the picture was appropriate, they weren’t going to pay up. However, common sense does seem to be making some inroads into that company, and the next printing (1998) had Josh’s Sourcery picture on it. I have not but should have seen a copy of the Estonian edition by now (13 August) as I think Varrak’s edition of Colour was published in May, so no other details are available at this time, as I have only seen a copy of the front cover picture. The artist has also given Twoflower four eyes, but by the time we had been shown the copy and I had pointed out the error the covers had already been printed, and it would have been unfair to ask Varrak to reprint a corrected version for that small mistake. Unfortunately the design for The Light Fantastic was used for this Hungarian edition. Pendragon succumbed to economic forces and closed its doors, but their translator, Istvan Nemes, set up Cherubion which published The Light Fantastic with Josh’s picture for Colour, (though for some reason his European agent gets publishers to use his real name, Ron Kirby, in the credit line as here) in 1998. Pocket published the first mass-market paperback edition in France. The original French edition, published by L’Atalante, was a larger format paperback. This, too, has the cover edition credited to ‘Ron Kirby’. Rather attractively, their editions also include a larger version copy of the cover picture as a laminated card. When the contract with Innovative for the publication of The Colour of Magic as a four part comic was drawn up, it specified that Terry had to be shown and approve the illustrations, but the first he and I knew anything of what was likely to appear was when we saw their publicity booklet Previews #7 - December [1990] Releases. The proposed style, pencilled by Scott Tolson and painted by Scott Rockwell, was vetoed by Terry and all the artwork that far completed had to be scrapped and entirely redrawn, only the general layout being retained, so publication was delayed until the following year. Gross, by the way, had just painted Innovation’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat (1990). The first computer game to be issued with a Discworld theme was The Colour of Magic, produced by Delta 4, and issued by Piranha, a subsidiary of Macmillan, in 1986. Piranha closed down fairly quickly when Macmillan was no longer prepared to support it - but not before it had sold all its excess stock and possibly the rights for an outright fee. Curiously, within a couple of years - when we first learned of the deal - I discovered that both buyer and seller had mislaid their files concerning it.... Last year the Spectrum version (with a black and white copy of the original cover artwork) was issued by The ZX Files. Although I have never seen a copy of the first Greek edition of Colour, I believe it was first published by a company called Zeno which folded, and its owner in a way that still puzzles me took all the rights to another company, Alter Para Pente, which he now appears to run, and has I think published it both as a 2-in-1 edition with The Light Fantastic and as a separate volume - that illustrated above, which was first published in 1994. Our understanding of the situation was not improved by the sub-agent’s failure to pay some royalty advances it received on Gollancz’s behalf, initially refusing to admit it had ever received the money. As a result, some titles we thought had been pirated were, it seems, published in good faith by Alter, but I am pessimistic about seeing any royalties from the agent. The part of Josh’s picture that normally appears on the front cover of most of the editions of Colour, here appears on the back cover. The only way I could get hold of copies of the Greek editions was to buy them through a Greek language bookshop in London, also called Zeno - but no connection to the original publisher. Colin Smythe 1998 |
