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Thursday, August 29, 2013

BiblioFile: O Fantasma No Espelho

We mentioned earlier in the year that 2013 marks 20 years since The Ghost in the Mirror was published. We were looking at the book’s history recently, recalling something that had bugged us once in the past, and thought we’d ask the boys...eh, our amigos...in Brazil about this one.

We feel pretty safe in saying that Brazilian publisher Ática released an edition of Ghost in January 1997 (ISBN 8508063741). We’re a bit confused as to the story behind the two different book covers we’ve seen for this, though. The only version we saw for years with the edition with the full, green box holding the title. What we had was an obvious bad scan or shrunken image - we couldn't even tell what the large brown object was in the upper right. Later we found a version of the book cover with a blue band across the top of the titles. From this image we now realized the large brown object was in fact a frowning mirror that hovered in front of a startled Rose Rita and Mrs. Z.

We periodically investigate these non-American editions in case some become available through online auctions. O Fantasma No Espelho has surfaced sporadically and from those brief moments we tend to believe the "all green" cover is the first printing of the paperback; the edition with the blue band was a second, later printing. Can anyone confirm this? Or we have the backwards? (Vicey-versa?) At the bottom of both covers are some sort of yellow box with text (that we cannot read) and a publishing mark that looks like an "ea". Perhaps this is the logotype for "Edição Ática"?

Our questions about this are thus, the answers to which we'd like to use to update our site's bibliography pages:
  • Does anyone know a printing history of the book to confirm/deny our suspicions above?
  • Does anyone know the illustrator?

If someone also has some clearer images of the front and back cover, as well as copyright pages, we'd love to see them.

Also, this appears to be Ática's only output of the Bellairs Corpus.  Another publisher would begin a four-book run of the Lewis Barnavelt series in the mid 2000s.

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