Don, of course, almost always prefers his wording to any changes made in editorial, any place, any time, but he got off lightly in the May 2005 issue of Firsts, up till the last few paragraphs. For people who like to check this stuff out, here’s his opening (which differs slightly from the version that saw print):

Dark Prince: The First Editions of Fritz Leiber

 Don Herron

 “Great language,” Fritz Leiber remembered, “is something I first heard spoken, not read: the plays of Shakespeare and, though not as often, the King James Bible.” Son of a renowned Shakespearean actor, as a child present during rehearsals he learned the entire play MacBeth—By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes—by heart. In time the dark fantastic intruded more and more on his imagination. Leiber was one of the last and possibly the most brilliant of the young authors who gravitated into the correspondence circle of the already legendary H. P. Lovecraft. His attraction to speculative literature in the forms of fantasy, terror and science fiction led him gradually into a career that lasted over half a century. Authors such as Harlan Ellison and Stephen King have praised his work as among the finest ever done in the genres for which they are famous.

And here is the original wording building up to the end—the curious will find several moments to compare and contrast with the print copy:

Another major retrospective, The Ghost Light, featuring a fearlessly revealing autobiographical essay plus a new title story, appeared from Berkley in 1984 in simultaneous trade paperback and hardcover states. The cloth version consists of 350 signed and numbered copies without dustjacket, as issued. The last collection of Fafhrd and Mouser tales appeared as a hardcover first from William Morrow in 1988 under the title The Knight and Knave of Swords. In 1990 the omnibus The Leiber Chronicles from Dark Harvest assembled fiction from every year of Leiber’s professional career. The impressive package is marred by some of the worst proof-reading I recall seeing (“and” frequently appears as “nad”), but it is a first – in trade hardcover state or in 52 signed lettered copies in leather, issued in a cedar wood slipcase (with an unknown number of overrun copies).

Near the end of 1990 Wildside Press released the first collection of Leiber’s essays as Fafhrd and Me, to celebrate the author’s appearance at Philcon in Philadelphia – 200 hardcover and 300 trade paperback copies. This same year I acted as ghost-publisher under my Dawn Heron Press imprint for a collection of poetry by Margo Skinner, As Green as Emeraude, with Leiber putting up the funds. He contributed an introduction and Donald Sidney-Fryer did the afterword. All three signed 500 numbered copies in wraps, with approximately 20 labeled as out-of-series, but Leiber’s lack of energy during the signing is evident in his autograph.

Death claimed Leiber on September 5, 1992, and the collector can see its creeping approach in his firsts for that year. Wildside Press collected three of his cat tales in Kreativity for Kats and Other Feline Fantasies, a 700 copy hardcover run with brown leatherette cover stamped in silver foil, all signed by the author on a tipped-in plate. These three cat stories plus more reappear in Gummitch and Friends from Donald M. Grant later in the year, but Leiber was dead before he could sign his designated line on the limitation page. The numbered, boxed edition of 1000 copies bears signatures by Leiber’s second wife from late in his San Francisco years, Margo Skinner, and the illustrator.

The most compelling posthumous first edition so far is The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich: A Study of Mass-Insanity at Smithville, released by Tor in 1997. Written in 1936 when Leiber was starting out as a writer, it bears marks of the influence of his correspondence with Lovecraft. The hodgepodge of fiction and articles assembled by Ben J. S. Szumskyj and S. T. Joshi under the title Fritz Leiber and H. P. Lovecraft: Writers of the Dark contains hardly any item not otherwise available, but at least prints Lovecraft’s side of the Leiber-Lovecraft letters. Released by Wildside Press in 2003, it is of dubious value to the collecting community, as Wildside had evolved by this point from a press with stated edition runs to a print-on-demand operation. A more intriguing item for the completist is David Wiesner’s illustrated edition from 2004 of Gonna Roll the Bones, 150 copies signed by the artist in a slipcase, published under the Milk & Cookies imprint of Simon and Schuster. This Caldecott Award winning artist adapted Leiber’s tale as his main senior project while enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Under his twin imprints Midnight House, for horror fiction, and Darkside Press, for science fiction, John Pelan of Seattle recently has been assembling new editions of Leiber’s short fiction, typically anchored with previously unreprinted stories. As with other modern specialty presses, such as Tartarus in England, Pelan’s short print runs sell through almost on publication and the value soon escalates in the out-of-print market. The Black Gondolier and Other Stories and Smoke Ghost and Other Apparitions appeared in hardcover runs of 450 copies. Day Dark Night Bright and Horrible Imaginings went up to 500 copies (but the latter, while the copyright notice reads 2004, did not see print until early 2005 because of delays at the printer). The titles One Station of the Way and Adepts & Arkham are announced for publication this year.

The first editions of Fritz Leiber contain a marvelous array of imaginative fiction that has enthralled both readers and fellow writers for over half a century, novels and stories extrapolated from a fascinating life, absorbing and transmuting each influence into work incontrovertibly, delightfully, darkly his own.

Copyright © 2005 Don Herron