EFF, last call

Attention! Attention! Jeremy Crampton informs me that the Urth novella EMPIRES OF FOLIAGE AND FLOWER is available now in the book THE BEST OF CRANK! Publishing history: First published by Cheap Street--you can't afford this one. First magazine appearance in "CRANK!" no. 2 (Winter 1993)--might be hard to find now. Story history: This is the story that the Cumaean and Severian talk about in the Stone Town. That is all. =mantis=

You may not be able to afford the Cheap Street Empires of Foliage and Flower, but if you can, or if you know someone who's got it, do by all means track it down. It is, to quote Ultan, "a re- markably lovely book." There are two editions, what Cheap Street calls their Collector's Edition and their Publisher's Edition. Both are entirely hand-made (well, I don't know that the paper is hand-made) and printed on a hand-cranked letter-press. Cheap Street's prices are high, but you may be able to find it for less; since it's in admittedly slight demand, book dealers don't tend to charge cover price. Even L.W. Currey, who tends to be expensive, sells the Publisher's Edition at less than list. I recommend looking for the book on Advanced Book Exchange (http://www.abebooks.com/), Bibliofind (http://www.bibliofind.com/), or Interloc (http://www.interloc.com/). From what I've seen, the Collector's Edition tends to sell close to its original cost of $200, while the Publisher's can go for from anwhere between its original cost of $600 down to about half that (though this will, of course, be subject to availability, etc.). As a matter of fact, everything I've seen from Cheap Street is really nice. They are also, as you'll recall, the original publishers of _Biblio- men_ (later republished in a considerably less expensive edition by Edgewood Press, which is run by Bryan Cholfin, the same fellow who publishes CRANK!--I think he now edits a major publisher's sf line in New York), and of a bunch of Wolfe chapbooks, including the BotNS titles "The Boy Who Hooked the Sun" and "The Old Woman Whose Rolling Pin Is the Sun", and the non-BotNS titles "At the Point of Capricorn", "Slow Children at Play", and, I think, a couple of others. Mark Millman

Actually, I thought it was overrated as a book-object, but I've always felt that about Cheap Street. Perhaps it just shows that I'm not enough of a bibliophile to pick up on the things which are so lovely about it.