Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut [Hamilton Press 2001]

Slaughterhouse-Five contains 24 full-page engravings by Barry Hoffman who also arranged the type and page-layout along with John Hoffa at Hamilton Press. The text was letterpress printed by Frank Underwood at Madison Press on Rives Lightweight. The cover is a hand-printed lithograph by Karen Beckwith. The book was hand-bound by Barbara B. Blumenthal. 100 copies were planned, but due to the scarcity of the historical maps of Dresden used as endpapers the limitation was never reached.

Beautiful! But hard to come by, that's certain.

This looks like an interesting example of a not uncommon occurrence among small publishers, particularly ones in the "fine press/limited edition" realm: the abandoned edition. It starts with only binding a portion of the edition, reasoning that revenues from initial sales will fund binding the rest. When those sales don't happen, the unbound copies stay that way. The publisher would have been better off issuing a smaller edition in the first place.

The Slaughterhouse colophon (how about that river down the right side of lines 8 - 12!) states the edition was bound by Barbara Blumenthal. It also states "period maps" were "used as the basis to create the endpaper graphic" (i.e. it was printed), so a shortage of endpapers doesn't seem a likely cause for the edition to be truncated. I found a post that explains some of this: a different binder was brought in when the unused sheets were resurrected, and the box with the printed endpapers must have gotten lost somewhere along the way. They should print & insert a sheet explaining the book's post-publication story, & state how many of this second iteration were completed. Probably make it more interesting than the original.

That's absolutely beautiful. How many copies were completed?

If it had been signed by Vonnegut I would be salivating over this edition. My personal copy is sadly not letterpress, but it is signed by Vonnegut and has original illustrations - it is the Easton Press DLE which I'm very happy with.

A copy of this edition was available a few months ago on Abe or Biblio for around $600. I regularly regret not picking it up, Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors.