My leatherbound, gold-inscribed edition of Hyperion by Dan Simmons from the Easton Press

Today on Things I Love Very Very Much

January 31, 2025

Let me preface this by saying I have been very, very, grumpy since the start of the year (at the time of writing this it is mid-January). My husband went and lost 20 kilos right before my very eyes and I grudgingly felt like I had to follow suit (New Year, New Me! ugh). And so I have been on a diet since the start of the year, and have been eating only two calorie-counted meals a day with very little cheating, as cheating results in the weight not being lost at all and therefore renders all my previous suffering for naught.

I’m tired of being hangry all the time.

However.

I woke up this morning to a package delivered to me and I opened it and it was my last-minute Christmas present to myself, a leather bound, 22k gold-inscribed edition of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion.

And life became worth living again.

I was in such ecstasies that I hugged my husband and told him I loved him when he went off to work, something I had not done since I started my diet. He glared at my book and didn’t seem to appreciate it as much as I thought he would. Weird.

But anyway.

These pictures cannot do it justice, in real life it is magnificent. The pages are beautiful and thick and edged with gold!! and slightly sepia (my favorite color!) and filled with expensive-looking printing and the leatherbound backing or whatever it is you call it smells like “old bookstore filled with magic”. When you open it there is a beautiful rendering of the Shrike in a classy blue and black almost-watercolour on the first page. I have never owned any leatherbound special edition of anything; it was never something my parents would or think to spend money on, and in my country, you can’t just walk around a corner and find decent editions of anything but Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. These people of the Easton Press are heroes!! I love it so much that I can already feel this is going to be a problem.

Actually, I was surprised by how difficult it was to find. Hyperion is (or so I thought) an absolute classic that transcends generations and is one of those books that go on the list of 10 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books That My Children Are Required To Read, and I thought everyone felt the same way, but, if we go by market data, it appears that this is not the case.

I went down this rabbit hole while shopping for books for Christmas presents for various nephews, nieces, and children of people. After hours of looking for good books, ideally classics or educational (I am picky) that were also well-priced and shipped to my country for free (I am also cheap), I decided I needed a Christmas present for myself too, and I decided what I would like more than anything is to have a new hardbound version of the Hyperion Cantos to display proudly in my library and gloat that I have it and show to my visitors (not to read, obviously, I have my Kindle for that and my Kindle lets me read in bed in the dark).  And so I started Amazon-searching, expecting to be able to find a hardbound edition with a click of a button, but to my surprise, there were none. All Amazon had was a flimsy paperback, and I didn’t want that! That one is for n00bs! Any self-respecting four-peat reader of the Hyperion Cantos deserves better than that! And when confronted with this abyss, I was seized with this urgency to (I realize now as I write this; at the time it just felt like an irrational, very strong shopping urge) prove (to whom exactly? Your guess is as good as mine) that the Hyperion series is still relevant and being appreciated in this day and age for the magnum opus that it is. This is the greatest space opera ever written, for Christ’s sake. What the… how can people not realize this! How is a hardbound version of the Cantos not readily available for purchase at a nerd’s whim!

And so, an hour later, after frantic Googling, I landed on the Easton Press website, and into the page where a lone book – only Hyperion, the first of the four-book series of the Cantos-  lay in wait and ready for purchase. It was USD120 or so if I recall, which seemed like quite a good deal to me as I saw that other leatherbound books from the Easton Press can go for about USD150 or so. I did buy it, but I was, and still am, quite bummed that Easton Press had not seen fit to sell the other Cantos books as well.

So… if anyone from the Easton Press ever reads this, please take pity on a nerd and publish leatherbound (but please, aesthetically matching and the same size as the Hyperion book I already have) versions of The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion. In exchange, and aside from purchasing a set for myself obviously, I will write a post glorifying the Cantos series so that maybe a dozen or so more nerds will be encouraged to spend a bit more on a nice edition, as well.

And can I just say, well-done to these Easton Press people. About two nights ago, before I received my copy of Hyperion, I received an email from them with a special offer for a more-than half price-off edition of Ender’s Game, which, aside from being their usual leatherbound, gold-inscribed offering, was SIGNED BY ORSON SCOTT CARD and came with a Certificate of Authenticity. They were offering it to me for about Fifty US Dollars, which is an insane price. I saw the email and stared for a few moments at their website video of this old guy opening the book and displaying Mr. Card’s signature and displaying the Certificate of Authenticity and grumbled and was tempted but thought to myself “this is too good to be true” and because I had just done some impulsive shopping earlier that day (bitterly regretted my purchase of some useless office-appropriate clothes), decided not take them up on their offer.

But after seeing my new copy of Hyperion, of course the first thing I did this morning after lovingly putting it in a place of honor in my library shelf, was to immediately purchase Easton Press’s Ender’s Game. I am such a happy sucker.

Update on February 25, 2025: I did purchase Ender's Game and the experience was not quite what I expected. See my post on it here.