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Saturday, December 12, 2020

Something About A First Printing of “Face”

From the collector’s corner.

We’ve seen a number of editions of books from the Bellairs Corpus over the decades. Hardcovers. Paperbacks. Zelinsky. Goldman. American. French. Polish (ugh). 

Frederic S. wrote us recently to point out something I hadn’t seen before. It involved a first printing copy of The Face in the Frost. His copy – and indeed, my copy as well – of the original hardcover has light blue boards with an image of horses pulling a wagon. This is an illustration created by Marilyn Fitschen for chapter 8 of the book. However Frederic points out an edition he found online where the front boards feature intertwining black vines and flowers on a white background. 

My first thought is this is some special binding, sort of like a book club edition but I’ve not read one exists. So what is this? Anyone else seen a version such as this?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It looks like a Library rebind to me. Does it have any library markings inside? Many libraries had their books rebound in a tough binding that would hold up better, and this appears to be one of them. Although the publisher released a Library binding as well as a Trade binding, both very similar, the publishers bindings were not as strong as the rebound editions.