Some Oddities in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series

http://tolkienandfantasy.blogspot.com/2018/02/some-oddities-in-ballantine-adult....

ETA - it seems to me this is a group worth reviving

For some reason, I'd never until now looked at https://www.librarything.com/publisherseries/Ballantine+Adult+Fantasy+Series
although I have a score of checkmarks on the list.

>2 paradoxosalpha:

I'd also not noticed, though I have a couple (not quite a score) entries as well.

ETA Well, I have only a couple of the Ballantine editions; I do have many non-Ballantine editions of titles in the BAF series.

The wikipedia article on the BAF series is actually pretty thorough, and offers insight into where Lin Carter was going with it.

I also saw recently someone (Doug Anderson maybe?) writing about even more of Carter's series plans, BAF and otherwise drawn from his notebooks, was it?

I do collect BAFs as such, although I'm not a completist, and many BAF titles I prefer in other editions. I have at least one that I picked up just because it was a BAF, with no other testimony to its quality: Red Moon and Black Mountain. I've done a pretty good job of collecting the Dunsany BAFs. Of those, I lack only At the Edge of the World and The King of Elfland's Daughter. (The latter I have in the Fantasy Masterworks edition.) I've got a couple of Clark Ashton Smith BAFs and I'd love to snag the others at some point.

I don't have any Cabell BAFs e.g.; I have all those titles as Kalkis. A few of my actual BAFs I'd rather have in more substantial editions. I'm thinking especially of the Orientalist tales Vathek and The Shaving of Shagpat.

Actually, now that I look at it, I have more than the check marks show, if non-BAF editions of BAF titles count. I have The Three Impostors in the Joshi The Three Impostors and Other Stories (correctly un-combined, with contains relationship in place).

I don't have any actual BAF editions - I doubt they were ever much sold over here - but I've got a number of titles in other editions. Mostly e-books as it happens.

I love the BAF editions. I must have 30-40 of them. I was collecting them passively at one time, and was happy every time I chanced upon one, until the Internet made it trivial and I stopped.

For easy reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballantine_Adult_Fantasy_series

https://www.librarything.com/publisherseries/Ballantine+Adult+Fantasy+Series