Big Planet

US precedes and is the only book-form first: Avalon Books (New York), 1957. Text-state trap — this title has no "true first" in the textual sense a first edition normally implies. Vance's manuscript ran perhaps 120,000 words and was cut by him to about 72,000; Startling Stories (September 1952) cut it again to roughly 52,000 for serialization; Avalon cut it a third time to about 47,000 for the 1957 hardcover. The Ace Double D-295 paperback (1958, backed with Slaves of the Klau) is a later reprint and shorter still. The magazine-length text did not reach book form until Underwood-Miller (San Francisco), 1978 — 236 pp., limited to 1,000 copies, dust jacket and interior illustrations by Stephen Hickman, with 111 copies signed by author and artist and 889 unsigned — which Currey and John W. Knott (both ABAA) correctly catalogue as "first printing of the unabridged text," i.e. a first thus, not the first edition. Collectors who want the book take the Avalon 1957; collectors who want the text take the Underwood-Miller 1978. Both are legitimately collected and should be named separately.