For a time now I’d been wanting to reduce my collection of gamebooks. This was partially for space, and partially so I could concentrate on the series that mean the most to me. I found potential buyers online but the (very fair) offers received for the books I had decided to sell hardly covered the cost of shipping them. I had no regrets when I decided to toss about 200 books into a recycling bin a few weekends ago.
The silver lining of this process was that in the process of searching for potential buyers I found a store that had some items for sale I was very interested in. I hastily made a purchase, and a box arrived in time for my birthday (today). These were inside:
The core of my collection is the Fighting Fantasy series, which I have loved since childhood. I’ve got hundreds of volumes, which means many copies of each since there are only about 70 unique books. It’s been many years since I’ve found an imprint I didn’t have, so I was surprised to see the above for sale. Of course I already own each book – in fact I already had 8 different copies alone of City Of Thieves – but I didn’t own the ‘Green stripe’ edition. Now I do 🙂
As happy as I was with these, I also bought this:
I was absolutely amazed to see they had this. It’s issue #2 of the Fighting Fantasy magazine from 1985. This was a ‘holy grail’ item to me, and given the scarcity of these I had essentially given up ever owning one.
It’s a fairly slim publication, sparse on editorial content. It reprints (half of) Warlock Of Firetop Mountain with beautiful large reproductions of the art, and also contained an original new solo adventure called Caverns Of The Snow Witch:
It’s short at only 190 entries, but would eventually be expanded and become the 9th FF book. I recall when I learned this as a child being amazed a magazine existed with gamebook adventures in it!
Indeed Warlock magazine was almost unobtainable in Australia. I somehow knew of it and looked for it in newsagents but only ever owned one copy, specifically #11 (which Adam inherited from me and graciously returned to me decades later). Much later I learned the magazine was poorly distributed even in the UK, so it’s a miracle any ever made their way to Australia at all.
So you can imagine how fast I clicked that ‘submit order’ button when the store I bought the above at didn’t just have one Warlock, but had eight:
These are all from 40+ years ago, and represent about two-thirds of the entire run of the magazine (which ended at issue #13). I was so happy to open the box when they arrived, and learn they were all in great condition. Whoever owned these took care of them!
These magazines are a delightful window into the early years of gamebooks. Full of news, reviews, artwork and advertisements, they also contain many original adventures – almost none of which were ever republished.
These magazines were never distributed to the USA so I remain amazed I found them for sale at an American hobby store. I wonder if they came from the same collection, and why the owner sold them?
And if you’re wondering, yes they were expensive 🙂
The above is a photo of my current Japanese Warlock magazine collection. I’ve got almost all of them, and you can see the magazine survived much longer in Japan than the 13-issues it ran for in the UK. Here’s a photo of the first dozen issues in two different languages:
Just holding and flipping through these brings a big smile to my face. Happy Birthday to me 🙂
