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Keep Circulating the Tapes/Literature

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  • The Doctor Who Expanded Universe Eighth Doctor Adventures are out of print. There's 73 of them. You can buy them used, if you want, but even though there's so many, this probably won't be a situation where Crack is Cheaper comes into play, because you'll never be able to find enough to ring up much of a bill. Your other option is downloading PDFs, and they're not hard to find. The only trouble is that apparently, A.I. Is a Crapshoot to the point that it can't even transcribe a book properly; one novel ends up introducing three characters with identical personalities named Fitz, Htz, and Fltz; the vowel-challenged latter two, thankfully, never reappear. I wonder how that happened. There's also the "Canvine homework!", where the Canvines come from. And for some reason, the Doctor ends up "rutting" when any sensible person would be running. But you can actually fit 73 novels on a flash drive!
  • Welcome to The NHK by Tatsuhiko Takimoto is out of print and despite the sheer fan veneration of the original book the manga and anime were based on, there's no word on when the light novel will be reprinted because the Tokyopop light novel line mostly folded. The sad thing is out of all the light novels ever released in English, Welcome to the NHK was special because it was for its time one of the only ways young people found out about the hikikomori phenomenon since this concept was so niche and yet the book badly marketed this aspect.
  • The notoriously rare Final Destination: Death of the Senses, the last Final Destination novel published by the now defunct Black Flame, was only on the market for a short time before being recalled due to a printing error, and its almost impossible to get a physical copy of it (as one website put it — "getting your hands on a copy is like cutting off your own hand with a rubber spatula... it can be done, but it isn't easy...")
  • J. D. Salinger wrote a number of short stories other than the ones collected in Nine Stories, and blew off publishers who wanted to reprint them. So resourceful fans tracked down the magazines in which these stories originally appeared, and circulated photocopies of these.
  • The Dragonlance Kingpriest Trilogy is currently out of print, and shows no signs of going back into print any time soon. Which is a shame because it is one of the best trilogies in the entire novel line.
  • Back in the 50s, the Stratemeyer Syndicate began to rewrite and shorten the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books to remove outdated slang and terms (ie: "chum", "roadster", etc.), politically incorrect villains, racist terms, etc., and took the old editions off the market. Then, from 1991 to 2007, a publisher by the name of Applewood Books reprinted the first 16 Hardy Boys books and the first 21 Nancy Drew books with the original dustjackets and bindings. However, these have gone out of print (most can still be bought new), and the only way to get the original editions of the remaining books is to buy older editions from antique stores and eBay. Oddly enough, in-book ads for the original canon tout the revised books (plus the 20 or so that came after) as "The Originals"...
  • The autobiographical A Father's Story by Lionel Dahmer (father of Jeffrey Dahmer) is out of print.
  • The compilation of stories under Stephen King's Pen Name Richard Bachman (The Bachman Books) has been out of print for many years. This is due to the the fact that one of the included stories, Rage (in which a student holds his class hostage at gunpoint after shooting two teachers) was found in the locker of a student who committed a school shooting in 1997. When King learned that his story may have had some connection to the event he requested that it go out of print. While finding the other Bachman stories in the collection is not difficult, while the only ways to find Rage is old copies and internet reproductions.
  • Thomas Ligotti's classic Songs of a Dead Dreamer was printed in minuscule numbers, as was its revised 1989 edition. A handful of the stories are anthologized or available online, but the book as a whole is a highly valued rarity.
  • Any book that, for any reason, goes out of print, can become this, as can books which make significant changes between editions. For example, any of the pre-1951 printings of The Hobbit sell for much more money than those of the later editions, since they contain the original Chapter 5, where Gollum was friendly and offered to give Bilbo the Ring. This was then revised to fit better with the new story Tolkien was writing. Since there were only 4 printings, and many of those were destroyed in war-time, they are very rare.
  • The Campbell era of Astounding Science Fiction. Although many of the more popular stories are reprinted in anthologies, the only issues which are available as eTexts are from before Campbell took over, and no true compilation volumes have ever been printed.
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