All images are © the respective artists and magazine
publishers as detailed throughout the site.
The story behind Jaunting the Aether
The British Reprint Edition [BRE] of Astounding Science Fiction was
published by ATLAS PUBLISHING & DISTRIBUTION CO. LTD. from 1939
through to 1963.
The BRE content was always a truncated edition of the US original.
During the 1940's and early 50's many stories were omitted, Book Reviews
and Letters were subject to ruthless pruning, interior art disappeared.
Much of this was due to the wartime and post war paper restrictions.
Until the end of 1953 the publishers maintained a pulp format. Later
editions were digest size and almost full reprints of the US editions
running approx. three months behind the original issues.
However, there is one mystery with regard to these BRE's [and indeed
all Atlas reprints of American pulps] - the covers were repainted
copies of the original. Some were faithful copies, but many were inferior.
Despite this, the artwork was always credited to the artist of the
original US edition.
This site is designed to show the front cover images of all editions
side by side.
I am very conscious of the ownership of the images reproduced here.
I realise many of the artists are long since dead and both Street
& Smith, the publishers of the US edition and Atlas Publications,
the publishers of the British Reprints have long since been absorbed
into conglomerates or simply gone out of business.
In all cases where known, I have identified the artist of the original
US edition. As yet neither I, nor any of my "helpers" have
been able to get even a sniff of who the British copyists were.
With all the reproductions I have tried to give an accurate visualisation
of the size difference between the American and the British editions.
Pages may be a little slow to load. But my intentions for the site
are geared to people who are genuinely interested in this little known
offshoot of British SF magazine publishing and not the surfers who
barge in and swiftly out of sites that take longer than a nanosecond
to download.
Some of the images are not of the best quality and I would genuinely
like to find better ones. If you can help, I would be grateful.
Source of Images: Thanks and All That
About half of the images shown are scanned from copies in my own collection.
The rest were kindly provided by a number of people, in particular
Greg Pickersgill, Kevin Williams, Jim Linwood, Terry Gibbons and Peter
Weston. Others helped without knowing it.
I would especially like to thank Greg and Peter for urging me on
with this project.
