I have never read this collection of stories and am interested in getting a copy. On Amazon there seem to be multiple versions for different prices a confusing array of poor reviews for the formatting of some of them. Could someone suggest which publisher or page count I should look for to get a complete one, I would appreciate it.
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This is the one I have.
The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers
ISBN: 9781840226447
I bought it from The Book Depository and paid $5.00 for it
The cover is yellow (a plus), and it contains all the stories from the original 1895 collection. It's a relatively small book coming in at 179 pages. The paper quality is nothing special, and other than a very brief introduction it doesn't have any extras.
Does the King in Yellow exist in a more definitive edition? Is there a version filled with copious foot-notes or end-notes? Does it exist in some more 'deluxe' format? I may want to upgrade my copy at some point in the future. All suggestions are welcome.
The review I read about the ”deluxe“ edition made it sound pretty not deluxe or even readable so buyer beware especially in this case.
I purchased this version on Amazon also for $5.00. Thanks for the info it was very helpful.
@Daniel Falch That was my experience as well when I was trying to make this same decision a few months ago. In general, I find Amazon really annoying whenever multiple editions are involved. I've just been trying to track down copies of The Gunslinger from before 2003 (when King retconned some of it) for later this year, and that was a challenge (but I won, in the end!).
This is a great question. I have a copy that I bought while traveling that has terrible, terrible errors. In fact, when we did The Repairer of Reputations I discovered that Brandon thought there were more section breaks than I did ... and he was right. So this time when we went to do The Mask, I picked up the book called The Yellow Sign and Other Stories: The Complete Weird Tales of Robert W. Chambers (ISBN 1-56882-170-0). This is published by Chaosium, an RPG publisher. It's edited by S.T. Joshi and is quite a nice volume. Except that it doesn't have all the stories in The King in Yellow because Joshi or Chaosium deemed then "not weird fiction," which is disappointing.
All of this is to say only that I had the same question a few months ago and couldn't come up with a good answer. But we will probably continue to pull stories from the Chaosium book I got.
I don't always agree with Joshi's judgments on the weird fiction 'canon', but to be fair in this case he's right - the other stories in the collection aren't weird fiction. That's not to say they aren't good stories, just that if you read straight through the first four and then carry on expecting more of the same, you'll get a severe case of genre whiplash (or at least disappointment). From what I remember (which admittedly isn't much), they're kind of like The Mask but without the weird element. Just stories about people (mainly artists and other Bohemian types) living in Paris. I think at least one of them is set during the Franco-Prussian war, which is pretty cool.
@Karanthir This is my recollection as well, though I actually thought that Franco-Prussian War was actually some other war in the same alternate reality as the other stories. We'll find out together in 2026!
Haha, I look forward to it!
I actually have a theory that the stories go backwards chronologically, and so get less alternate reality as the collection goes along. The later stories also being "non-weird" probably also fits into this somehow, now I think about it.