Recommended



picture 1 of 2


picture 2 of 2   Top

price:
author:
title:
$5.00
Zelazny, Roger
THE DOORS OF HIS FACE, THE LAMPS OF HIS MOUTH
book-date: 1970
publisher:
edn-date:
printing:
format:
cvr art:
cvr price:
GRADING:
Avon
1974
1st
Paperback
Jeff Jones
$1.25
VG+

First Avon printing April 1974 paperback (#18846; Doubleday hardcover was in 1970.) Cover by Jeff Jones, 252 pages, $1.25 cover price. Condition is VG+: very tight and s almost quare; spine has faint raised ridges down middle - as printed (not the same as a crease), age tanning is mild and uniform (consistent with its vintage, and darker on insides of covers); light overall wear, 2-1/2" fold-trace at bottom right (see scan.) No stamps, marks or writing - a clean copy.

The first paperback appearance of Roger Zelazny's second collection: The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth and Other Stories - and the nicest looking edition that you will ever find. The title story won the Nebula Award and was a Hugo nominee; "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" was also a Hugo nominee - both of these had previously been collected in Four for Tomorrow in 1967. "The Keys to December" and "This Mortal Mountain" were both Nebula nominees, and "This Moment of the Storm" was nominated for both Hugo and Nebula awards.

In an introduction to a later collection, Zelazny referred to this collection as the "one with the dead fish on the cover" - an accurate description of Doubleday’s less-than-inspired cover art. As a writer who had just made the top of the field - I think Zelazny had better expectations for his first hardcover collection. Hopefully this first paperback with a wonderful cover by Jeff Jones cheered him up somewhat. I know you can buy hardcovers of the new NESFA Press total retrospective of his short fiction and get all of these stories spread out over a few volumes - but they are scraping the barrel in an effort to include everything he wrote, and in my opinion - diluting the general quality. Some of Zelazny’s worst should STAY buried. These are good stories, and I recommend this book as a fine introduction to the short work of one of the brightest stars in the genre.

The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth
The Keys to December
A Rose for Ecclesiastes
Devil Car
This Mortal Mountain
This Moment of the Storm
The Monster and the Maiden
Collector's Fever
The Great Slow Kings
A Museum Piece
Divine Madness
Corrida
Love Is An Imaginary Number
The Man Who Loved the Faoli
Lucifer

Original appearances were from 1963 to 1968 - in Magazine of F&SF, New Worlds, Galaxy, If, Worlds of Tomorrow, Fantastic, Magazine of Horror. One further complication with this title: the 2001 iBooks edition was an amalgam - combining all stories from this book with the contents of Four for Tomorrow (a 4 novelette collection which had 2 stories in common with this.) By adding those 2 other stories, you get the best of both worlds - unless you wanted a hardcover edition or this nice Jeff Jones cover.