Rare Variant £16.95 Jacket
The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition
Publication: London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1990. First Edition.
Notes: The UK edition of one of Stephen King's most popular books in a very scarce variant dust jacket.
These doubled-jacketed copies are not well documented but they come in at least two versions. This is the more desirable as the second jacket differs in several ways from the trade jacket:
1) The price is £16.95 whereas the final price of the book was £14.95.
2) The front flap of the second jacket has 6 lines in the first paragraph on the front flap, compared to 8 for the trade jacket.
3) The last paragraph on the rear flap has 3 lines, compared to 2 for the trade jacket.
4) The space for the barcode is blank.
The other variant jacket lacks the textual differences of this jacket but is also priced at £16.95 and lacks a barcode.
The second jacket (underneath the trade jacket) is probably some sort of trial jacket, perhaps supplied on some review copies, before the price and ISBN had been finalized. Since there are several books with multiple jackets, it seems like they entered the marketplace as published books and therefore are not trial issues, they are true states of the first edition. As such, these dual-jacket copies are among the rarest of Stephen King trade editions.
The uncut Stand may be one of the few novels that may actually be better for being longer (most books would be improved if they were shorter—following Elmore Leonard's dictum, "Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip"). This edition adds 150,000 words (basically two regular-length novels) to the 1978 text and a few line drawing illustrations by Bernie Wrightson.
According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer (April 22, 1990), this new edition was officially published on April 25. There have been claims on the web that the UK edition came out first. This is unlikely. On May 4, the Southern Daily Echo (Southampton, England) reported that the uncut Stand would be issued "next month." That seems overstated as ads for the UK version appeared in the Evening Standard beginning May 10. But those dates are still later than the April 25 American release.
1009, [9:blank] pages.
Edition + Condition: First UK edition (first printing, stating "This edition first published..." on the copyright page, with no indication of later printings). Rare two-jacket variant. A fine copy in a near fine pair of dust jackets with light bumping to the top of the spine.
Provenance: Barry Levin to James Strand (1990, $275). With the Strand estate bookplate on the front pastedown.
Item No: #365725
Price: $4,800