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TheDaemon
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Posted: Fri Aug 09, 2013 4:26 am

Now for a couple of special ones:

This is a copy that I think was sent to Ian Sturrock (author of several WFRP supplements and Hogshead employee until it folded) from someone called Carl. I believe the 'carl' to be Carl Sergeant, author of a few Warhammer supplements like the 'Lichemaster'. In those days I had a reputation within Hogshead for paying over the odds for collector stuff so Ian got put in touch with me by James Wallis and I bought it from him for around £100 - £150. I would regularly donate to charity in exchange for special considerations on rare items by James Wallis. This wasn't long after it came out so it was roughly twice the original cost of the book (£75 per leather bound book) and I think Ian got it for nothing as an oddity.

It is a flesh coloured, un-numbered copy that was never sent out to customers and should have been destroyed. It couldn't have been used as a replacement copy for damaged or lost customer copies due to the misprinted pages. The pages themselves are actually repeated bundles of pages, not just misprinted page numbers. So, an entire bundle of pages is repeated and a section missing in their place. This has no wax sealed letter or any of the extra stuff that arrived with the official copies. I have no idea how this copy escaped from Hogshead. It should have been destroyed. The only copies that should be out there are numbered copies or copies with inscriptions to their recipients as special gift copies. This one is a complete rogue which should have been shredded.

Last edited by TheDaemon on Fri Aug 09, 2013 6:14 am, edited 3 times in total.

TheDaemon
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Posted: Fri Aug 09, 2013 4:31 am

This one is the one that I didn't want to claim I had until I actually found it this morning. This one is the copy referred to in the letter from James Wallis that is the one 'official' mis-print that was not destroyed. It is a red leather bound un-numbered copy. It has an insert glued to the inside front cover which explains that it is a 'mutated' copy, I have photographed the mis-printed pages again and it is also signed by the authors on the 'mutation' insert on the front cover. I was sold this by James Wallis himself when Hogshead was being wound up. It has the official wax sealed letter etc that came with proper copies. This one is, obviously, a bit special within a set of books that are themselves a bit special.

I paid £150 for this particular copy. Paid to a charity selected by James Wallis. I got a few other things from Hogshead when they were wound up in exchange for charity donations. The one that springs instantly to mind is the original proofs of the Warhammer rulebook banner when Hogshead had the rulebook reprinted. It has been ages since I dragged them all out of storage and had a look at them but I think I have collected mint copies of everything that existed from the 1st and 2nd editions of WFRP. The only thing I know that I don't have is the leather bound, signed, first edition rulebook that was sold in the 9/11 charity auction. I would , literally, pay several thousand pounds sterling for it because it is the only thing that I know exists that I don't have.

Last edited by TheDaemon on Sun Aug 11, 2013 11:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

TheDaemon
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Posted: Fri Aug 09, 2013 6:09 am

I have found the email that I exchanged with James Wallis over my 'extra' copy of Realms of Sorcery. I include it here for the purposes of getting the history of these items out there and for general interest purposes for this rare edition of the book. I also include an email sent by Ian Sturrock (author and Hogshead employee) at the release of the leather bound edition of the book containing more detail about the edition. These emails were written much nearer the time of issue of the book (i'll provide the dates at the top of each email) so they are less subject to 'memory error'. Ian Sturrock's email was sent out to all of the recipients of the leather bound edition.

Email from James Wallis sent to me on Friday 22nd March 2002, after I queried the long delay in sending me that special copy that I mentioned in my last post, the one with the insert claiming to be a 'mutant' copy:

>Hi James,
>
>Any chance of finding out when I will get my purchase?

We're still waiting to receive the signed certificates back from Jo Walton in Canada -- we've done a special certificate for your defective copy, but the signatures on it will work as its stamp of authenticity (because any mug can run a bogus certificate off a laser-printer, right?). There was a delay because it's taken Jo a while to find a permanent address in Canada, so we couldn't send the blank certificates to her for a while. But it's all happening now.

--
James Wallis [email protected]
Director, Hogshead Publishing Ltd http://www.hogshead.demon.co.uk
18-20 Bromell's Road, London SW4 0BG UK T-0207 207 5490 F-0207 207 5491

I'd forgotten all about the fact that they'd had a special certificate run off for me, signed by Ken and Jo. This must be what is stuck to the inside of the cover of the RoS edition in my last post. As you can see, the edition eventually arrived. Obviously the contact details for James Wallis are no longer valid as the company folded so I haven't redacted them.

Email from Ian Sturrock to all recipients of the leather bound Realms of Sorcery edition. This was sent on Thursday 14th February 2002.

Hi,

Well, as I wrote last week, all the copies of the limited-edition Realms of Sorcey books are now en route, or have arrived. Many, many thanks for bearing with us as long as you have done.

There have been problems and delays with the Customs authorities in some countries, particularly for many of the US and some of the Scandinavian shipments. We are dealing with each incident as soon as we find out about it, and only a few books are still held up. If you don't have your copy yet, it should be very soon.

If FedEx contact you about arranging a delivery please get back to them as soon as possible. FedEx only holds onto undelivered packages for five working days, and if they have any problems getting in touch with you to deliver it, they may just send the book right back to us. We really don't want to box them up and ship them out again if possible.

There's a second problem.

Three people who have received their leatherbound RoSes have alerted us to a problem with the interior pages. One of the blocks of 16 pages has been missed out (pages 96 to 112), and a later one has been included twice (pages 113 to 128). We don't yet know how many copies are affected, but we think it's only a small percentage of the total. So, please check your copy carefully when you receive it, and if it is defective then get in touch with us right away.

If you have received an imperfect copy, please accept our sincere apologies. As you can probably imagine, we're tearing our hair out -- those of us who have hair -- over this.

We will replace all defective copies reported to us, at no charge to you. We're still working out exactly what we need to do: we have a few spare leatherbound RoSes here, which we created to replace any copies lost or damaged in transit, but we don't yet know if there will be enough. We may have to go back to the binder. Replacement copies of the books will contain new certificates signed by Ken and Jo Walton, with the same limited-edition number as your defective copy. All defective copies will be destroyed.

Once we learn exactly how many copies are defective then we will know whether we have enough spares or if we need to bind more, and we will send out a status report and plan of action to everyone who is affected.

(If you have a defective copy and want to hang onto it, or you'd like to negotiate to buy one -- go for it. Some book collectors regard rare, imperfect copies as more valuable than perfect ones. However, I suspect most people will want a readable, usable copy of the book.)

What's really annoying for us is that this problem only seems to have affected the leatherbound edition. Despite the fact that we're using the same pages from the same print-run as the softback and hardback editions, we've not had a single report of mis-bound copies of them.
Inevitably, it's only the expensive ones.

If you have received your limited-edition, and it's all okay, then we'd really like to hear your opinions of it. Let us know what's right and what's wrong, so we can improve our service next time.

Once again, our sincere apologies.
--
Ian Sturrock, Sales & Marketing Manager [email protected]
Hogshead Publishing Ltd http://www.hogshead.demon.co.uk
18-20 Bromell's Road, London SW4 0BG UK T-(0)207 207 5490 F-(0)207 207 5491

One thing that I was very curious about but never found the answer to is 'who got numbered edition #1' of the leather bound book. I suspect it was a Hogshead employee, one of the authors who wanted something a bit more official than an unnumbered presentation copy, or it was given to Games Workshop. I was very careful to get my order in as soon as I was able and then to email James Wallis to ensure that I got 3 consecutive numbers rather than 3 random numbers in the list of 100. The person who got copy #1 must have been in there like a whippet. This is the email that I exchanged with James on the day I ordered, Friday 7th September 2001.

Dear Mark,
>I have just ordered, via the web based secure order form, one of each
>of the varieties of leather bound editions, one of each colour. I would
>like 3 consecutively numbered volumes preferably 100, 101, 102. If this
>is not possible I would prefer 3 consecutive numbers as early in the
>numbering set as possible.

I've assigned you numbers 2,3, and 4; hope that's acceptable!

RoS is going to the printer on Monday. Printing should take about four weeks; add a week to ship the 100 copies to the UK, and we should start to get them back from the book-binder another couple of weeks after that. So I'm anticipating being able to start sending books out around the end of next month.
--
Ian Sturrock, Sales & Marketing Manager [email protected]
Hogshead Publishing Ltd http://www.hogshead.demon.co.uk
18-20 Bromell's Road, London SW4 0BG UK T-(0)207 207 5490 F-(0)207 207 5491

Last edited by TheDaemon on Sun Aug 11, 2013 11:32 am, edited 1 time in total.

TheHistorian
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Posted: Sun Aug 11, 2013 10:37 am

Very cool information! So flesh does exist...

I have one signed (black) and one unsigned (red). I'll have to double check them for misprints, but I think both are correct.

Areas of interest/knowledge: Harn, WFRP, Ars Magica, anything BRP based such as CoC, Runequest, Pendragon and all their related games

TheDaemon
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Posted: Sun Aug 11, 2013 10:51 am

I don't know for certain but I think the misprints were all flesh coloured. I have only ever seen 3 and they are all flesh coloured.

I remember reading on the first page that your unnumbered copy was originally Graeme Davies' presentation copy. That's quite impressive provenance. There can't be many official unnumbered copies as a lot were used to replace the misprints. I think I may start keeping a look out and see if I can pick up a few more copies over the next decade.

Jammy
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Posted: Thu Aug 29, 2013 11:23 am

'The Numbered Mutant'

Huge thanks to TheDaemon for providing these fascinating posts concerning Realms of Sorcery Limited Edition history, particularly concerning the infamous 'mutation' (misprinting) issue.

Daemon, I think perhaps there is one other type of Realms of Sorcery Limited Edition you don't possess, beyond the 9/11 one ... and it's one-of-a-kind, as identified in one of your earlier posts ... it's The Numbered Mutant.

Filling in the last piece of the jigsaw: like you, back in 2001 I ordered and received one red (no. 12), one flesh (no. 31) and one black (no. 84) (Unlike you I didn't have the presence of mind to ask for a sequence ...)

All three duly arrived. I started reading my flesh coloured one. Then almost immediately came Hogshead's misprint recall. I checked all three of mine and - horrors - the Mark of Chaos was found in one.

Of course I thought about returning it but for many different reasons I decided to keep it.

All the returned copies were, as you say, destroyed. I am sure that, as you also confirm, this is the only misprinted copy of the numbered 100 left in the world. Before I read your posts on this thread, years ago I had heard from a friend who had spoken to a Hogshead employee that there was only ever one still out there.

I still have it to this day.

For those aficionados who are interested in all this, I guess just one question remains: 'Which one was it?'

Well, notwithstanding the speculation about all misprints being flesh coloured, the one that escaped the fires wasn't.

It's black, no. 84.

One of a kind now - a curious yet unique piece of WFRP and Hogshead history:

'The Numbered Mutant.'

I hope that this is of interest and thanks again to Daemon for the posts!

TheDaemon
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Posted: Sat Aug 31, 2013 6:31 am

Jammy wrote in price check.. limited rpg stuff:'The Numbered Mutant'

Huge thanks to TheDaemon for providing these fascinating posts concerning Realms of Sorcery Limited Edition history, particularly concerning the infamous 'mutation' (misprinting) issue.

Daemon, I think perhaps there is one other type of Realms of Sorcery Limited Edition you don't possess, beyond the 9/11 one ... and it's one-of-a-kind, as identified in one of your earlier posts ... it's The Numbered Mutant.

Filling in the last piece of the jigsaw: like you, back in 2001 I ordered and received one red (no. 12), one flesh (no. 31) and one black (no. 84) (Unlike you I didn't have the presence of mind to ask for a sequence ...)

All three duly arrived. I started reading my flesh coloured one. Then almost immediately came Hogshead's misprint recall. I checked all three of mine and - horrors - the Mark of Chaos was found in one.

Of course I thought about returning it but for many different reasons I decided to keep it.

All the returned copies were, as you say, destroyed. I am sure that, as you also confirm, this is the only misprinted copy of the numbered 100 left in the world. Before I read your posts on this thread, years ago I had heard from a friend who had spoken to a Hogshead employee that there was only ever one still out there.

I still have it to this day.

For those aficionados who are interested in all this, I guess just one question remains: 'Which one was it?'

Well, notwithstanding the speculation about all misprints being flesh coloured, the one that escaped the fires wasn't.

It's black, no. 84.

One of a kind now - a curious yet unique piece of WFRP and Hogshead history:

'The Numbered Mutant.'

I hope that this is of interest and thanks again to Daemon for the posts!

Excellent information to have. It seems like this single topic will probably end up being one of the most valuable sources of the history of these books.

It's interesting that we now know the number of a misprint that was never returned (black, 84) but I do question now whether or not there was ever only one numbered misprint.

This is because Hogshead would have to know about the misprint in order to state that they knew there was one. In Ian Sturrock's I posted, he stated that they had been contacted by 3 people which is obviously an early indication. James Wallis stated that he remembered it eventually being roughly a third of the print run.

If Jammy never told Hogshead about his misprint but simply didn't return it for a proper copy then would they ever knew it existed. It stands to reason that Hogshead thought there was a numbered misprint because someone actively contacted them to tell them it was a misprint and that they were keeping it. Jammy, did you make your misprint known to Hogshead? There would have been 3 categories of people - people who told Hogshead, returned their copies and got a new one; people who told Hogshead that they had a misprint and were keeping it; and people who didn't tell Hogshead and they will not have know how many of those there were.

If we analyse the sentence that we are basing this assumption on then James Wallis only says that be 'believes' that only one of the misprints survived (which chimes with my last paragraph - I'm not sure he could ever 'know' who had one and kept it quiet) but also that he implies that it was one of the 120 (numbered plus unnumbered versions) rather than only one of the numbered ones because they eventually sent all of them out so therer will be numbered and unnumbered misprints and the unnumbered ones seem to have been circulated more than the numbered ones.

I think perhaps we may have mutated the meaning over several posts to arrive at the wrong conclusion about there being just one numbered misprint - my feeling is that there are likely to be more. It's more likely that the one existing misprint that James Wallis is remembering in his post is the one he went to so much trouble to get signed by the authors for me and it sticks in his mind. Jammy's copy may be something that we could have guessed would exist but whos existence was previously unproven. at least now we know that there is at least one official numbered misprint out there, number 84.

There was one other correction I need to make about the 9/11 auction book. It wasn't a Realms of Sorcery edition that was auctioned. I probably didn't write it very clearly in my brain dump, but the 9/11 auction was for a first edition leather bound copy of the original rulebook signed by all the original authors. I've never seen it since it was sold and have no idea where it went but it sold for $1,500 at the time. Hopefully, it will emerge one day but it is one to look out for.

Jammy
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Posted: Sat Aug 31, 2013 7:24 am

Hah! Yes, I guess you're right, Daemon, in that it's easy to get over-excited with this kind of thing and jump to conclusions. I had assumed that via some kind of internal review Hogshead had been able to identify how many misprinted copies were in fact created, numbered and sent out (because eg they were printed / bound in one tranche etc) - and hence had been able to work out that all but one had been returned. That isn't impossible, but it's pure speculation unless an authoritative former Hogshead source could confirm it, or why it was believed that there was only one (and whether it was numbered or unnumbered). All I can say from my own knowledge is that no, I did not inform them of my misprinted copy, I just retained it. It would be interesting to know how many people (beyond myself and Daemon) bought multiple copies - it seems less likely that someone who bought only one would keep a misprint.

I think perhaps all that can be said as of today is that black number 84 is the only known numbered mutant ... it will be interesting to see if any more hard evidence of other 'survivors' comes to light.

In the meantime, here are some pics of the beast in question

You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.

TheDaemon
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Posted: Sat Aug 31, 2013 9:00 am

The auction for your red leather numbered edition on eBay right now raises another interesting point - the extras that came with the editions.

Many people will have opened the wax sealed cultists letter that came with their edition and thus the broken seal copies will create another layer of value. I saw this one coming when they arrived as well and all three of my copies plus the signed unnumbered misprint letters have unbroken seals. If I remember correctly, there was such a cry from people not wanting to break the seals that they actually issued unsealed versions of the letters for people who just wanted to know what was inside the wax sealed letter but didn't want to open it to find out. I am not sure if they actually sent anything to people or just published it somewhere on the web but I do remember seeing it even though I kept mine sealed.

I've got no idea how many purchasers there were of hte original copies but at £75 per copy I wouldn't imagine there were many people who bought more than one copy. Only Hogshead would know.

Jammy
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Posted: Sun Sep 01, 2013 8:35 am

It will be interesting to see how my auction does - the losing bid for the copy that sold in June for £323 without parchments was still over £300. I have been getting a lot of page views and interest although given the high minimum price (£300) bidding might well not start until the last day (Friday) ... The difficulty in relation to the parchment issue, of course, is that the sample size is small and the variability high: at the risk of stating the obvious, if (eg) mine sold for £400 we might deduce that parchments plus wax seal intact adds £75 value, when actually it might just be the random factor, or my book being unused, or more widely advertised ... RoS Limited Edition sales are so infrequent that discerning a pattern and relative values could be a decade's work ... !!

Jammy
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Posted: Tue Sep 10, 2013 10:00 am

For those who might be interested, now or in the future: the earlier red limited edition sold in June 2013 for £323 and mine sold in September 2013 for £322, both on ebay. I think we have established a 2013 price-point for red limited editions, with or without parchments ... !

T.Dorst
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Posted: Sun Sep 29, 2013 9:43 am

I am looking for a red version of the Realms of Sorcery limited. If you have one to sell, please send me a message.
I would be willing to pay up to 500 dollars depending on condition and completeness. I prefer not buying on ebay.

beasterbrook
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Posted: Sun Sep 29, 2013 5:57 pm

I can vouch for Tobias.. he's a collecter of limited ed stuff;)

Brette:)

Being healthy is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

T.Dorst
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Posted: Thu Oct 03, 2013 2:54 pm

Thanks Brette.

I am also looking for a Runner's Black Book 2074 limited Edition.
If anyone knows where to get one please send me a PM.

Thx.

T.Dorst
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Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2014 4:55 pm

At the moment I am searching for the following books:

Call of Cthulhu 20th Anniversary Gen Con 2002 and Origins 2002 Version

Willing to pay 500+ Euros per book

T.Dorst
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Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2015 6:40 pm

Is anyone willing to part with the Red leather version of the Realms of Sorcery??
I am willing to offer a lot $$$

TheDaemon
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Posted: Sat Jan 09, 2016 5:45 am

I have sold two of my copies. I have the black one left and two flesh coloured ones left if anyone is interested in purchasing any of them. I have numbered copies 3 and 4 and the remaining flesh coloured one is a misprint that has no documentation or letters, isn't signed and is an unofficial copy that shouldn't exist. The numbered copies have their letters intact and their seals are unbroken. They are the copies pictured in this topic.

I have sold the official mutant and the red colour copy already.

Anyone interested then drop me an email: [email protected]

I also have mint copies of every other WFRP 1st and second edition source book if anyone is interested and also the original artwork proofs for the rulebook when Hogshead republished it. I'm willing to accept offers on any part of the stuff that I have.

T.Dorst
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Posted: Fri Jan 15, 2016 5:08 pm

Very smooth transaction. Books have arrived in fantastic condition.
Thanks a lot to TheDaemon. Highly recommended!

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