Underwood-Miller: Publications in Chronological Order

Underwood-Miller was a San Francisco/Columbia, PA specialty small press founded in 1976 by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller. Its first book was a first hardcover edition of The Dying Earth — Vance became “the author most identified with the press,” and over the next eighteen years Underwood-Miller produced the first hardcover (and in several cases first-ever book) editions of a large share of Vance’s back catalog, plus several reference works about him. The partnership dissolved in 1994; its last book was a second reprint of The Dying Earth, closing the circle back to its first. Tim Underwood then founded a separate solo imprint, Underwood Books (Grass Valley/Nevada City, CA) — primarily an art-book publisher, but responsible for one significant later Vance title; see that section below. Chuck Miller does not appear to have continued publishing Vance titles solo after 1994.

1976

The press’s debut title.

The Dying Earth — 1st hardcover ed. of the 1950 story-cycle

1977

Fantasy and Science Fiction by Jack Vance (Tim Underwood & Chuck Miller) — bibliography chapbook

1978

The Eyes of the Overworld — 1st hardcover ed. (Cugel the Clever/Dying Earth #2)
Big Planet — 1st hardcover ed.
Fantasms: A Bibliography of the Literature of Jack Vance (Daniel J. H. Levack & Tim Underwood) — bibliography; placed 5th, Best Reference Book, 1979 Locus Awards
The View from Chickweed’s Window — 1st book ed. of this mystery, as “John Holbrook Vance”

1979

Underwood-Miller’s busiest year, spanning Planet of Adventure, Dying Earth chapbooks, and two mystery firsts.

The House on Lily Street — 1st book ed. of this mystery, as “John Holbrook Vance”
City of the Chasch — 1st hardcover ed. (Planet of Adventure #1)
The Seventeen Virgins — chapbook (Cugel/Dying Earth novella)
The Bagful of Dreams — chapbook (Cugel/Dying Earth novella)
The Languages of Pao — 1st hardcover ed.
The Blue World — 1st hardcover ed.
Green Magic: The Fantasy Realms of Jack Vance — collection
Morreion: A Tale of the Dying Earth — chapbook (Rhialto/Dying Earth novella, later revised for the 1984 Rhialto the Marvellous)
Fantasms II: A Bibliography of the Works of Jack Vance (Levack, Underwood & Kurt Cockrum) — revised bibliography, published by K. Cockrum rather than under the Underwood-Miller imprint itself

1980

Servants of the Wankh — 1st hardcover ed. (Planet of Adventure #2)
The Dirdir — 1st hardcover ed. (Planet of Adventure #3)
The Face — 1st hardcover ed. (Demon Princes #4)
Galactic Effectuator — collection (the Miro Hetzel novellas)
The Last Castle — standalone illustrated chapbook of the 1966 Hugo/Nebula novella
Jack Vance (ed. Underwood & Miller) — critical essay anthology, Taplinger’s “Writers of the 21st Century” series; published by Taplinger, not under the Underwood-Miller imprint

1981

The Pnume — 1st hardcover ed. (Planet of Adventure #4)
The Book of Dreams — 1st hardcover ed. (Demon Princes #5)
The Star King — hardcover reissue (Demon Princes #1; first pub. Galaxy 1963–64/Berkley 1964)
The Killing Machine — hardcover reissue (Demon Princes #2)
The Palace of Love — hardcover reissue (Demon Princes #3)

1982

Gold and Iron — hardcover reissue under Vance’s preferred title (= Slaves of the Klau/Planet of the Damned, first pub. 1952/1958)
Lost Moons — collection gathering several previously uncollected early stories
Bad Ronald — hardcover ed. of this mystery

1983

A year dominated by reissues — the Durdane trilogy in a matching slipcased set, plus several chapbooks and mysteries.

The Houses of Iszm — chapbook, 700 copies
Son of the Tree — chapbook
The Magnificent Showboats of the Lower Vissel River, Lune XXIII South, Big Planet — 1st hardcover ed. under this author-preferred title (= Showboat World, Pyramid 1975; Big Planet #2)
The Man in the Cage — hardcover reissue of the Edgar-winning mystery (first pub. Random House 1960)
The Faceless Man — hardcover reissue (= The Anome, Durdane #1), slipcased with the two below
The Brave Free Men — hardcover reissue (Durdane #2)
The Asutra — hardcover reissue (Durdane #3)
Suldrun’s Garden: Lyonesse I — hardcover ed.; most bibliographies credit Berkeley Books’ 1983 mass-market paperback as the true first book edition, so this U-M hardcover’s exact status (parallel edition vs. a listing error) is unresolved

1984

Space Opera — hardcover reissue (first pub. Pyramid 1965)
Cugel’s Saga — 1st hardcover ed. (Dying Earth #3; the first-ever book publication was Timescape/Pocket Books’ 1983 mass-market paperback). Sources disagree on the U-M edition’s exact date, giving either 1983 or May 1984.
Trullion: Alastor 2262 — hardcover reissue (Alastor #1)
Marune: Alastor 933 — hardcover reissue (Alastor #2)
Wyst: Alastor 1716 — hardcover reissue (Alastor #3)
Rhialto the Marvellous — Dying Earth #4; published under the Brandywyne Books imprint (Underwood-Miller’s separate, all-genre limited-editions line launched with Waldenbooks in the mid-1980s), not “Underwood-Miller” proper

1985

The Complete Magnus Ridolph — collection of the Magnus Ridolph stories; sources disagree on the exact date, giving either 1984 or January 1985
The Green Pearl: Lyonesse II — book-original 1st ed.
Strange Notions — 1st book ed. (= Strange People, Queer Notions, Vance’s most-delayed mystery to reach print)
The Dark Ocean — 1st book ed. of this mystery, issued in a shared slipcase with Strange Notions

1986

The Augmented Agent and Other Stories — collection
The Dark Side of the Moon — collection, 14 stories plus an author’s introduction

1987

Araminta Station — book-original 1st ed. (Cadwal Chronicles #1)

1988

Bird Isle — 1st book ed. under this author-preferred title (= Isle of Peril), usually sold as a 2-volume signed/boxed set with the title below
Take My Face — hardcover ed. (= The Flesh Mask)

1989

Madouc: Lyonesse III — book-original 1st ed.; World Fantasy Award, Best Novel, 1990

1990

Chateau d’If and Other Stories — collection

1991

Ecce and Old Earth — book-original 1st ed. (Cadwal Chronicles #2)

1992

Throy — book-original 1st ed. (Cadwal Chronicles #3)
When the Five Moons Rise — collection
The Jack Vance Lexicon: From Ahulph to Zipangote (ed. Dan Temianka) — a glossary of Vance’s invented/coined vocabulary

1993

The Five Gold Bands — hardcover reissue (= The Space Pirate/The Rapparee, first pub. 1950/1953)

1994

The partnership’s final year.

The Dying Earth — hardcover reprint, the press’s last book, closing the circle back to its 1976 debut
The Work of Jack Vance (Jerry Hewett & Daryl F. Mallett, ed. Boden Clarke) — bibliography that became the standard Vance reference for years afterward; cited elsewhere in this project’s VIE.md

Underwood Books (Tim Underwood, solo, post-1994)

After Underwood-Miller closed, Tim Underwood founded Underwood Books (Grass Valley/Nevada City, CA) in 1994, specializing mostly in fantasy/SF art books (the long-running Spectrum annual anthology, Frank Frazetta and Jeffrey Jones art books, etc.) and reissued Philip K. Dick and Stephen King material. It also quietly published the true first editions of Vance’s last two novels — a fact easy to miss because the more widely-seen Tor trade hardcovers followed within months and are what most readers and even some checklists cite as “the” first edition:

Night Lamp (1996; Gaean Reach) — Underwood Books, April 1996: limited/signed edition of 600 numbered copies, cover by Stephen Hickman, ISBN 1-887424-18-0, $60. Tor’s trade hardcover followed in November 1996 ($23.95). Confirmed by ISFDB, Wikipedia’s own infobox for the novel, SFE picture gallery, and a dealer listing (L.W. Currey) for the Underwood limited edition.
Ports of Call (1998; Ports of Call/Gaean Reach #1) — Underwood Books, January 1998: limited/signed edition, cover by Rick Berry, ISBN 1-887424-39-3, viii+239pp, $60. Tor’s trade hardcover followed in April 1998 ($24.95). Confirmed by ISFDB and a Dutch review site citing “Eerste druk: Underwood Books, Nevada City.”
Lurulu (2004; Ports of Call #2), by contrast, appears to have been a Tor-only first edition — no Underwood Books edition has been found for it, suggesting the practice of an Underwood limited edition preceding the Tor trade edition did not continue past Ports of Call.
The Laughing Magician — an omnibus combining The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel’s Saga (Dying Earth #2–3), illustrated throughout by Stephen Fabian, reworking art from the 1977 Underwood-Miller Eyes of the Overworld. ISBN 1-887424-00-8 (978-1-887424-00-4).
Publication history is unusually tangled for a Vance title, and sources disagree:
- First announced as in-progress in a February 1995 fan newsletter (The Vance Phile #5), tentatively “ready in May” at $75, signed/numbered/slipcased.
- Still being announced as forthcoming in late 2000–2002 fan-site news (release dates given as March 2001, then “early 2002”); at least one buyer’s Amazon order was pushed back to a March 2001 release that itself apparently slipped.
- pagesofpages.com’s checklist dates the book’s contents to 1997.
- ISFDB’s title record lists it as “unpublished” outright (with a full collation — 358pp, cover by Fabian — as if a full production existed but the book itself may not have shipped in that form).
- Yet multiple retailer records (Amazon, eCampus, AuthorWars) show it as an actually-sold hardcover with a 2011 or 2012 publication date (Amazon/eCampus both give 27 Nov 2012; books-by-isbn.com gives 2011), suggesting it may finally have been released roughly a decade and a half after it was first announced — or that retailer metadata is simply wrong/recycled from a listing that was never fulfilled.
- Net assessment: treat The Laughing Magician’s existence as a real, working title with confirmed cover art and an assigned ISBN, but its actual publication date and even whether copies were ever generally distributed are unresolved; do not cite a single date for it without flagging this discrepancy.

Notes

Several interviews and essays by Tim Underwood appear inside other publications rather than as standalone books, among them “A Talk with Jack Vance” (1985), the Dutch-language “Orbit Interview: Jack Vance” (1981), the afterword “Jack Vance: The Man and the Myth” (1994), and the three-part retrospective “Ten Years of Underwood-Miller” (1986, with Chuck Miller).
Sources consulted: ISFDB (publisher, title, and publication records); vancemuseum.com’s Jack Vance Underwood-Miller Bibliography (covers editions “up through 1992” with month-level dates and binding/limitation detail, but has not been rechecked against a live source); the Wikipedia “Underwood–Miller” article’s publication list (comprehensive but year-level only); pagesofpages.com’s Vance checklist (collection contents, not independently re-verified against ISFDB for every title); vancemuseum.com’s Jack Vance Information Archive (dated fan-news items, used for The Laughing Magician’s publication timeline); books-by-isbn.com and retailer listings (Amazon, eCampus, AuthorWars) for Underwood Books ISBN-block data; and this project’s own VIE.md for cross-checking true first-publication dates.
Open items: the View from Chickweed’s Window 1978-vs-1979 date conflict with VIE.md; the Cugel’s Saga and Complete Magnus Ridolph date discrepancies above; whether Suldrun’s Garden: Lyonesse I was really a distinct parallel hardcover; independent re-verification of the Green Magic, Lost Moons, The Complete Magnus Ridolph, When the Five Moons Rise, and Chateau d’If contents directly against ISFDB; and The Laughing Magician’s true publication date/status (see above).