Many years ago, so far back I cannot remember when or when, I bought a copy of F. Paul Wilson’s chapbook, A Little Beige Book of Nondescript Stories. This apparently is a series of small chapbooks published over the years by Borderlands Press. I was, at that time, more interested in picking up books by Wilson than in collecting a series of small (and, to me at least, expensive) chapbooks, so I never looked at buying any of the other books. Wilson’s book was apparently the ninth (or thereabouts) published, and part of what was then called Series I. Each book is published in a limited edition of 500 (though I have seen reports of some up to 600).
Over the years Borderlands Press has continued to release new books in the series. There are now over 50 of these books. There are 15 books in each series, and it’s now up to series IV (4). In looking for other books—unrelated to this series—I’ve seen mention of these again and again, which piqued my curiosity. At this point, there are so many in the series, and most of the older ones are prohibitively expensive, or impossible to find, that joining the search for them seems insane. The rabid collector out there might be picking up and storing what they can find, as well as some dealers who bought a bunch of each title and have held onto them, listing them for sale at handsome (to them) prices. I can’t see spending some of the money being asked for a few of the rarer ones.
All that being said, I recently picked up a pair of other books in this series, almost by chance. I was amused to find that they are not a uniform size. With each series, the height of the books increases slightly. If someone were to display all books in a shelf, they would appear in various colors (fine), but not a uniform height (strange for a dedicated series like this). Whether this was a conscious decision, or an aesthetic one, I don’t know. As a matter of idle curiosity, I made a list of all the books, then did searches online to compare prices. Of the ones that I found, there are a few that approach or exceed $150, which seems a lot for such a little book. Most of the newer releases can be found for $30-40, and there are some older ones that simply do not show up in any searches.
This all goes to show that if you want to collect a series like this, and be able to find all of them at decent prices, you need to get in early, and stick with the program. Arriving to the scene years later, like myself, means that I will need to be content with owning maybe five to 15 of these books. Again, this goes to show that I’m among the lower left side of the curve of the collector bell curve.
