Editing Jack Vance (section)

== Publication ==
For most of his career, Vance's work suffered the vicissitudes common to most writers in his chosen field: ephemeral publication of stories in magazine form, short-lived softcover editions, in which stories sometimes were insensitively edited beyond his control. As he became more widely recognized, conditions improved, and his works became internationally renowned among aficionados. Much of his work has been translated into several languages, including Dutch, Esperanto, French, Spanish, Russian, and Italian.{{NoteTag|name=languages}} Beginning in the 1960s, Jack Vance's work has also been extensively translated into German. In the large German-language market, his books continue to be widely read.

Vance was an original member of the [[Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America]] (SAGA), a loose-knit group of [[heroic fantasy]] authors founded in the 1960s and led by [[Lin Carter]]. Its purpose was to promote the [[sword and sorcery]] subgenre (such as Dying Earth stories by Vance), and some new works were published in ''[[Flashing Swords!]]'' anthologies edited by Carter, in both mass-market paperback and [[Doubleday (publisher)|Doubleday]] Science Fiction Book Club editions.<ref name=isfdb/><!-- for Vance, "Morreion" and "Bagful of Dreams" -->

In 1976, the fantasy/sf small press [[Underwood-Miller]] released their first publication, the first hardcover edition of ''The Dying Earth'' in a high-quality limited edition of just over 1000 copies. Other titles in the "Dying Earth" cycle also received hardcover treatment from Underwood-Miller shortly thereafter, such as ''The Eyes of the Overworld'' and ''Cugel's Saga''. After these first publications and until the mid-1990s, Underwood-Miller published many of Vance's works, including his mystery fiction, often in limited editions featuring dustjacket artwork by leading fantasy artists. The entire Jack Vance output from Underwood-Miller comes close to a complete collection of Vance's previously published works, many of which had not seen hardcover publication. Also, many of these editions are described as "the author's preferred text", meaning that they have not been drastically edited. In the mid-1990s, Tim Underwood and Charles Miller parted company. However, they have continued to publish Vance titles individually, including such works as ''Emphyrio'' and ''[[To Live Forever (novel)|To Live Forever]]'' by Miller, and a reprint edition of ''The Eyes of the Overworld'' by Underwood. Because of the low print-run on many of these titles, often they could only be found in science fiction bookstores at the time of their release.

=== The Vance Integral Edition ===
An Integral Edition of all Vance's works was published in a limited edition of 44 hardback volumes. A special 45th volume contains the three novels Vance wrote as [[Ellery Queen (house name)|Ellery Queen]]. This edition was created from 1999 to 2006 by 300 volunteers working via the internet, under the aegis of the author.<ref>{{Citation
| url = http://www.integralarchive.org/base3.htm
| title = The Vance Integral Edition
| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20160520231910/http://www.integralarchive.org/base3.htm
| archive-date = May 20, 2016
}}</ref> The texts and titles used are those preferred by the author.{{citation needed|date=December 2014}}

In 2010, Afton House Books presented ''The Complete Jack Vance'' {{ISBN|978-0-9825953-0-5}} in six large volumes using texts prepared by the Vance Integral Edition. Volume six has a table of contents for the volumes; otherwise there is no [[exegesis]]. Issues of the project's magazine ''Cosmopolis'' describe the production process (of interest to anyone wishing accurate transcription of scanned text) and the detection of some surprising errors such as the scanning of "and" being recognised as "arid" (''Cosmopolis 17'', page 8) yet resulting in a sentence that is both grammatically acceptable and plausible in context: "It was hot, arid dusty." Similarly, there is no bibliography of where the stories have previously been published. Cover art may be found via [[:Category:Jack Vance book cover images]] or at geofftaylor-artist.com<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.geofftaylor-artist.com/galleries/cover-art/author/VANCE%20Jack | title=Cover Art Gallery for Jack Vance &#124; Geoff Taylor }}</ref> and many other places.

In 2012, Spatterlight Press started offering [[Digital rights management|DRM]]-free [[e-book]]s editions of many of the works of Jack Vance, based on the source texts collected by the Integral Edition project. It is the intent of Spatterlight Press to publish the complete Integral Edition in e-book form, and also as print-on-demand paperbacks.<ref>{{Citation
| url = https://www.jackvance.com/signatureseries/
| title = The Spatterlight Press Signature Series
| access-date = September 22, 2018
}}</ref>   Gollancz uses the VIE texts in their "SF Gateway" editions starting in 2012.