GORMENGHAST FOLIO SOCIETY PLUS
The nice thing about The Easton Press is that they produced a fantastic Masterpieces of Science Fiction series of about 75 volumes covering most of the major works plus a few unexpected and interesting titles. Three volumes from The Easton Press Lensman Series rub shoulders with The Folio Society Gormenghast Trilogy. The quality of the type varies, sometimes it’s nice and clear, sometimes it looks like it’s been lifted straight from the pages of Planet Stories. You could stun a goat with some of these. They are hefty tomes and it sometimes takes real effort to open one.
Each book contains at least one colour illustration, often by a classic artist ( Kelly Freas for Orwell’s 1984, Joseph Mugnaini for Fahrenheit 451). The pages are also edged in gold and you get a silk bookmark to keep your place in First Lensman or Newt Gingrich’s The Essential American (signed in crayon by the writer). They’re bound in real leather with raised bumps across the spine and 24 carat gold lettering. The books are designed to look like they belong in a dimly lit library with ladders, squishy armchairs and balloon snifters of brandy.
are important pieces of cultural capital to be treasured. It may be hard to believe in the wake of the ignorant nonsense flooding the GOP at the moment, but there is a tradition of the learned establishment thinker or Harvard career academic of the 1950s for whom leather-bound copies of Plato’s Republic etc. The Easton Press in particular seems to be targeting that dying breed, the wise old intellectual Republican patriot who fancies an oak-lined library filled with Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon. If we’re completely honest there is a strong element of snobbery behind both companies. For those of you who might be interested in these editions I thought it might be interesting to talk about the differences between the two companies and their approach to publishing classics (and SF/Fantasy). They not only ran a Masterpieces of Science Fiction series but would also bring out occasional runs of other famous books, such as E.E. James, so I hid the book behind the fire place so no-one could jump out and wave it in my face at an unexpected moment. I’ve since gone through phases of collecting The Folio Society books over the years, but they rarely published any SF or Fantasy, so a while back I turned across the pond to The Easton Press, who also specialise in swanky editions for collectors. That one picture I could never bear to look at as a child was the illustration to ‘Count Magnus’ in the Folio collection of The Ghost Stories of M.R. My parents collected The Folio Society books in particular, so I was introduced them when I was about 7 years old. Growing up in an arty/literary family meant that every member more or less had their own personal library covering at least one wall of their room. I’ve always been a sucker for beautiful books.
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