Introduction, Just saying Hi, Lots of EP Books

Hi All, been lurking here a bit, decided to join in. I have been collecting EP books pretty much non-stop since joining the 100 Greatest in graduate school in 1989. From Moby Dick being the first, I now have 412 EP books and more coming! Have all of the 100 Greatest, Most of the Famous Editions, Adventure Series, Military Series, Readers Choice, Books that Changed the World and some misc others. Am just jumping into the LE, having just ordered Dante and also Ovid. These books, and more importantly the content within them, have been my one constant for 22 years now. Am lucky and thrilled to have this library to always turn to. I am currently reading Ben Hur, having just completed Spartacus.

Glad to see others out there. BTW, can any of you point me to more info on the LE for Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? I already have the six edition set from a number of years back (I think for around $300), how is this one different? Also, anyone have the LP of Gulliver's Travels yet? Worth it? Thanks!

Neither Gullivers or Decline has been published as of yet. I also have the 6 volume Decline set and am wondering how this new DLE will compare.

Welcome to the forum.

1: I would love to see some pics of your collection. In particular, more of the "rare" books, such as the Famous Editions and other OOP volumes.

Hi All;
Added a bunch of random pictures of various books in my gallery,

http://www.librarything.com/gallery/member/busywine

I have pretty much everything from Famous Editions over the last 20 years, all 100 Greatest, and a fair chunk of Great Books of the 20th Century, Adventure Series, Military Series, Books that Changed the World, Readers Choice, and some sets (like Decline and Fall of Roman Empire, The Conquerors, etc.), so let me know if you have any in particular you would like a photo of.

4: I would love to see more pics of your famous editions. In particular, those editions that are NOT reprints of the LEC books. Here is a list of the LEC titles:

http://www.majure.net/LECLISTOFTITLES.htm

Damn, that is a long list! Thanks for sending it by the way. I will try to compare against that over the coming days and let you know. On the surface of it, sure seems to have most of what EP ultimately used.

Out of curiosity, how many of the famous editions do you have?

6: yes, the Famous Editions are primarily taken from the LEC, but not entirely. There are some great books that are non-LEC. I look forward to your pics!

68 I think. A quick look on the shelves (let me know if you are interested in photo's of any):
Argonautica
Lysistrata
Meditations of Marcus Aurelias
Emma
Lorna Doone
Poems of William Blake
Three Penny Opera
Sinbad the Sailor
The French Revolution
Through the Looking Glass
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Moonstone
Explorations of Captain Cook
The Deerslayer
Two Years Before the Mast
Nicholas Nickleby
The Idiot
The Count on Monte Cristo (2 volumes)
Just So Stories
Tales of East and West
Silas Marner
Three Tales of Flaubert
Dead Souls
Wind in the Willows
Man in the Iron Mask
Far From the Madding Crowd
Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales
Notre Dame
Daisy Miller
The Water Babies
The Trial
Main Street
Le Morte D'Arthur
The Moon and Sixpence
Beowulf
The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci
Death in Venice
Magic Mountain
The Song of Roland
The Oregon Trail
The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche
Bells and Other Poems
Travels of Marco Polo
Eugene Onegon
All Quite on the Western Front
Cyrano de Bergerac
William Tell
Kenilsworth
Black Beauty
The Tempest
Frankenstein
The Grapes of Wrath
A Childs Garden of Verse
Lives of the Twelve Ceasars
Torrents of Spring
Tom Sawyer
Earth to the Moon
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods
Rhinegold and Valkyrie
The Invisible Man
The Time Machine
The War of the Worlds
Ethan Frome
Picture of Dorian Gray
The Glass Menagerie
Poems of William Wordsworth

9: I'm interested in all of those that were NOT previously released by the LEC. If you have time and can check the link I sent, it includes the book and artist, so it should be easy to tell which of those were not released by the LEC. Thanks.

For time sake, I just did a quick compare on which book titles are not in the LEC list from my above list. Caveat is there may be others above that have the same title from the LEC list, but not be the same edition EP is based on. Would need to do a more thorough look, which I can do later. Also, hopefully my compare was 100% accurate, but excuse a mistake if there is one or two. Also, some pictures are shaky! I added pictures for each here:

http://www.librarything.com/gallery/member/busywine/tag/Famous+Editions+not+from...

Lorna Doone - R.D. Blackmore
Three Penny Opera - Bertolt Brecht
Sinbad the Sailor - R. Burton
Through the Looking Glass - L. Carroll
Nicholas Nickleby - C. Dickens
Just So Stories - R. Kipling
Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales - N. Hawthorne
The Water Babies - C. Kingsley
Moon and Sixpence - M. Somerset Maugham
The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci - D. Merejcofski
Bells and Other Poems (though there is Poe's Poem's in LEC)
Black Beauty - A. Sewell
The Tempest - W. Shakespeare
Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods - R. Wagner
Rhinegold and Valkyrie - R. Wagner
The Glass Menagerie - T. Williams

Some of these are really, really nice. Especially, Sinbad, Moon and Sixpence, Bells, Black Beauty, The Tempest, Wagner's, etc.

Thank you! I appreciate that, and great pics!

"Through the Looking Glass" was published by the LEC, and they used the Tenniel illustrations (as did EP) since it is associated with Alice. The Moon and Sixpence was published by the Heritage Press, which is a sister to the LEC. I think all the others were not published by either the LEC or HP, but perhaps Django can correct me if I'm mistaken?

The Famous Editions are my favorite types of books from EP and I really, really wish I hadn't missed out on them. I know they still sell a few, but I wish they still had the collection available to subscribe to. I don't have the funds (or at least a wife willing to let me have them) for the Limited Editions, so the Famous Editions are usually the nicest I can find.

So far, I have gotten a used copy of "The Wind in the Willows" and plan to pick up a few more that aren't too hard to find, but some of the ones I really want are really tough to locate. I wish EP would republish more of these types of classic literature books than all the coffee-table stuff they keep making.

13: I'm in the same boat. I missed out on the Famous Editions. I think EP will republish the FE's, but we will have to wait patiently for them. Other members here have said that EP might release them like the Reader's Choice books, a few each year. They also release some FE's as single volumes, so maybe we'll see more of them that way. I'm hoping for "Through the Looking Glass", among others.

If they do start releasing some of the same titles in RC, I hope they do a better job than what they have in many of the RC's released to this point.....in general, RC's seem to be pretty bare bones, whereas FE's were very, very nice. Even if they needed to add a few dollars to the RC titles, would be nice to have more illustrations, etc.

15: indeed the FEs were very nice! I really doubt they will be releasing more, although who knows what books lurk in the hearts of EP...

15: No, I don't think they will be released as RC titles. I meant, they might have a different set of FE's each year (the way RC collections are released each year). I'm sure it would depend on whether or not that sales model works for them. It seems like they are experimenting by having a set of FE books for sale at $75 each and releasing some FE's individually for varying prices.

Personally, I do not doubt they will release more FE's. They released several in recent months. They must have sold well, because the website says "call customer service to determine availability of this item", which is what they typically do when stock dwindles, right? If they sold well, I see no reason why EP wouldn't release more FE's.

EP has already released quite a few former FEs as RCs -- including three of this year's volumes (Hardy, Maugham and Ovid). This doesn't bother me so much for volumes with black and white or two-color (black and a single color) pics, where they've done an ok job. What bothers me is when they dumb down multi-color pictures or exclude them altogether. This isn't just a problem with the RC series, however. EP has been doing this all along -- there are even EP volumes from the early 80s that didn't reproduce all of the pictures or all of the colors of the Macy-commissioned originals.

My biggest fear is that EP will reissue Famous Editions, with the same high-quality interiors, but with the newer production techniques used for the covers. For the older books, the leather quickly becomes glove soft, the gilding is deeply stamped into the leather, the endpapers use different colors of fabric, etc. For newer printings of many of the same books, the leather stays hard and glossy, the gilding is shallowly stamped into the leather in some places (and is seemingly applied onto the surface of others), and nearly all use the same color fabric on the endpapers. I could always go after the older volumes on eBay; however, for some books, it's not easy to tell whether you are buying an earlier or a later printing. Up until now, the Famous Editions, although their production techniques have changed like all of EPs books, have managed to retain enough of the old approach to "feel" as if they have been bound using a higher quality method than that used for volumes in the less expensive series.

Maybe someday I'll tell my story of the three Mobys -- not now, not here, though. I really don't want to throw a wet blanket over anyone's collection...

BTW: I have 96 actual Famous Editions (that is, 96 books that have the Famous Editions laurel on the title page), along with another dozen or so volumes from the eighties that were later included--in nearly identical editions--in the Famous Editions collection. I also have some later editions that had been previously published as famous editions and later incorporated into another series (Great Books of the 20th century, Reader's Choice, etc.), but some of these are lower quality than the actual Famous Editions and I hope to someday replace them with a vintage edition. I subscribed to the Famous Editions series when it was first introduced (I believe it was in 1983, maybe early 1984--I started collecting EPs with the 100G series in 1982), but I stopped a few years later, started again in the early or mid 90s, stopped again, started again in the mid 2000s. I really regret not having persevered with this series--although I own 96 volumes, there are a lot that I do not own (including some that are not particularly rare). You own quite I few that I don't, @busywine!! Very cool...and, yes, I'm jealous -- but not as jealous as we'd both be if @wailofatail were to list all his FEs here!! Oh well, looks like I better remain on good terms with eBay...

If you'd like to review my FE holdings, they are all logged into my LibraryThing catalog. I have set-up a collection containing all of my Easton Press books and I have tagged all of my Famous Editions using the tag Collector's Library of Famous Editions (so you can filter the collection using this tag to view only those volumes). Also, I have included high-resolution scans of the covers of about 90% of my Easton Press books, so you might enjoy viewing my catalog in Cover mode. Although, @astropi, there is no easy way to tell which of the books are not LEC reprints, I have recorded the illustrator as a secondary author for quite a few of the books (I'll eventually get around to updating the rest), so you may be able to compare that with the lists of LEC and HP publications. Someday, I may tag all LEC-commissioned books, but I have a lot of projects to complete before I embark on that one...

(Edited to correct grammar/typos)

Busywine, what set was your copy of "Journey to the Center of the Earth" from? I really like that cover, but I can't find it anywhere.

If you don't mind my jumping in, the edition with the volcano on the cover is from the Famous Editions collection.

Of the ones on busywine's list in post 11, the Heritage Press published :

Lorna Doone, illustrated by John Austen,
Nicholas Nickleby, illustrated by Steven Spurrier,
The Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci, illustrated with Da Vinci's art,
Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, illustrated by Arthur Rackham;

As well, the LEC and Heritage Press published editions of

Sindbad the Sailor, illustrated by E.A.Wilson;

and the LEC published an individual edition of The Tempest as part of their Complete Shakespeare edition, this play illustrated by E.A. Wilson, and in the 1980s published The Three-Penny Opera illustrated by Jack Levine.

The Richard Wagner Heritage Press edition came very late in the Norwalk, CT period when the Heritage Press was owned by the same company as Easton Press, and is, I suspect, the identical book in cloth binding. The Three-Penny Operawas never a Heritage Press edition, and to my knowledge, neither the LEC nor any of the incarnations of the Heritage Press ever published Kipling's Just So Stories, the Hawthorne Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, The Water Babies, Black Beauty, nor The Glass Menagerie.

>20 SilentInAWay:

Thanks, Silent!

Wow, you all are a wealth of knowledge. I did not realize Heritage Press published those.

SilentInAWay, love those pics, soooo jealous of some of those I do not have! :-)

I am certainly hoping EP does more of these, and hoping they do them with the quality we had gotten used to!

Um...I reviewed my catalog in LT and discovered that a large number of my EP books have not yet been tagged with their respective series. I went through the "complete" list of Famous Editions and found that I own another 16 that I had not tagged as Famous Editions. So I'm actually at 112 and counting...

I just put my order in for the 100 Greatest Books collection. My grandmother had given me Huckleberry Finn a few years ago. and now that I have my own money I can start collecting. I am very excited.

Good for you Anna_staisa, I am sure you will love them!

busywine, great collection!
After looking through your photos I gave in and purchased Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung saga from ebay. I can't wait until it arrives. Damn postal strike, hope it doesn't effect the delivery time.:(

Found a couple more Famous Editions...The Turn of the Screw and Erewhon!! Hope there are more hidden somewhere.

You sure Turn Of The Screw is in 'Famous Editions'? I always thought this one was only 'Masterpieces of American Literature'? Do you have a copy with the wreath or Notes From The Archives?

Yep, you are right, just looked again. Thanks for the correction!

>4 busywine:

I liked your copy of "Journey to the Center of the Earth" so much that I purchased a copy of my own. I was glad to find that it was still in pristine condition and included the Notes from the Archives and even the original, unused, Ex Libris sticker.

Yeah -- that's a nice edition. Too bad that noone wants to buy a copy on eBay so that the resellers have to keep lowering their prices.

Just wanted to say that your pictures also inspired me to want the Ring of the Nibelung books, also. They were actually pretty hard to find (for a reasonable price) but I did some looking around and got 1 a few weeks ago and the other about 8 days ago, which came in the mail today.

I love the artwork by Rackham!

>33 Arknight:, what a nice present to come in the mail for you today!