Remember when bookseller and collector Paul Dobish discovered that the Stanley McNail poetry collection Something Breathing was bound in two variants of green cloth?
“Until recently,” Paul tells me, “all of the copies of the Arkham House first edition that I had handled were in either of two green bindings.
“I just acquired — because it had a review slip with it — a copy in a third green binding.
“The bright light of my scanner enhances the differences versus viewing the same copies in less bright light.
“In the two-book scan, the ‘old olive’ copy is on the left and the ‘new’ copy is on the right:
“In the three-book scan, the old ‘forest green’ copy has been added on the right (‘olive’ still on the left with ‘new’ in the middle):
“Having now found a third, is there a fourth? Fifth. . . ?”
Paul continues, “In a similar vein, I am up to six clearly different red (although some tend more toward purple-ish) bindings for Don Grant’s edition of Howard’s Echoes from an Iron Harp.
“Having six, is there a seventh? Eighth?
“For Buffalo Book Company I have four completely different color bindings of E. E. Smith’s The Skylark of Space.
“On the Hadley edition of Van Vogt’s The Weapons Makers I have seven different bindings — blue, yellow, orange-brown, and four different shades of red/purple-ish.
“For Crawford’s F.P.C.I. the collecting challenge sometimes seems to approach simply finding any two copies in the same binding!
“Arkham House generally preferred ‘basic’ black, but thus far all of the copies of Brennan’s Nightmare Need that I have handled have all been in the same ‘hot pink’ binding.”
