I bought a used copy of the GuildAmerica hardcover of "A Wizard Abroad" and have been enjoying it immensely, but was wondering how this edition has 211 pages, or thereabouts, and later printings have over 300 pages. I'm guessing it's just something to do with trim size and fonts, but wanted to make sure that over a hundred pages of story didn't get added in later editions. Thank you for writing, and thank you for your time.
Hi there!
Re your concern: it’s a font-size and paper-thickness issue.
Remember, the GuildAmerica / SF Book Club books were routinely about packing as much story as possible into as compact and cheap a package as possible. They were always pitching their books directly to people who couldn't routinely afford first-edition releases from big publishers. "I'll wait for the book club edition..." was something you routinely heard a lot, back in the day.
Also, that first US edition had a little publisher-based weirdness going on behind the scenes. Abroad was completed during the slightly weird period when the YW books' original publisher (Dell) decided that they were going to dump newer writers,. and many midlist ones, so they could use that revenue to buy more books from already-bestselling writers. (Some of that weirdness has previously been discussed over here, and here, for those who want to get into the details a bit more.)
Therefore when the book was ready—and had just been published by Corgi in the UK as an mmpb (with this cover) in 1993—to everyone's bemusement, Dell elected not to pick Abroad up, and then began allowing the first three books to slowly go out of print. However, a long history of good sales with SF Book Club (i.e., my first nonlicensed bestseller, Support Your Local Wizard, was with them) led SFBC to offer to publish Abroad in HC. (They also commissioned the cover from artist David Cherry, C. J. Cherryh’s brother.)
SFBC set their copy, IIRC, either from my copyedited MS or directly from the Corgi edition. So there's no question of omitted material: everything was there. (And I'd absolutely have noticed if anything was missing, secondary to the business of correcting spellings and usages from UK ones into US ones.)
Anyway, the difference in formats over years has produced a surprising number of differing page counts.
The Corgi PB: 285 pp
The SFBC HC: 211 pp
The Harcourt small-format HC: 342 pp
The initial Harcourt mmpb: 339 pp
The Harcourt/Magic Carpet digest edition (and "digest" here just means a larger format intended for younger readers, not any kind of condensation): 355 pp
The 2001 Harcourt mmpb with the newer cover: 356 pp (as it had an excerpt from The Wizard's Dilemma in the back)
...So go figure. ...Anyway: glad you're having fun with the book! I did too. :)
