Template talk:Edgar Rice Burroughs (books)

The Moon Maid: one or three?

I've removed the following as they are part of a serial that later became part of the book The Moon Maid:

The Moon Men (1922) • The Red Hawk (1925) •

--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 22:49, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

What is the most commonly found version of these stories these days? The only one-volume edition of all three stories that I know of is hardcover, many years old, and entitled "The Moon Men".

Unless the most common version includes all three stories, I think they should be listed separately. By analogy, this template lists The Gods of Mars and The Warlord of Mars separately, even though they have been published together as a single book. — Lawrence King ^(talk) 04:31, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Original book publication was of all three stories as The Moon Maid (title taken from the first story); the Canaveral Press edition of the early 1960s was also a combined edition, but retitled The Moon Men (title taken from the second story). The Ace Books editions of the early 1960s onward separated the work into its constituent parts, and published The Moon Maid (first story only), The Moon Men (second story only), and The Red Hawk (third story only) as separate volumes. [Note: 2nd and 3rd actually issued together, as per below comments.] These were the first and only book editions of the stories separately, I believe. Not sure if Ballantine Books, which took over Ace's portion of the Burroughs corpus after Ace abandoned it, ever published the Moon series, but if so it probably followed Ace's practice. I believe the only edition since has been from Bison Books, which again combines the three stories in one volume -- not sure if they use the "Maid" title or the "Men" title. Guess we'd have to say the "usual" practice is one volume, even though most present day readers probably got their first exposure to the stories in the three volume [note: actually 2 volume] period.

The Mars analogy is not a good one; the standard form of publication for that series has always been for separate publication for separate stories (with the exception of the tenth and eleventh volumes, which were collections of short stories), the existence of some omnibus editions notwithstanding. BPK (talk) 06:56, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Sounds reasonable. Tangential point: I think that either the Ace or Ballantine paperbacks put them in two volumes (not one or three), with volume two entitled The Moon Men but including both Moon Men and Red Hawk. But I'm not completely sure about this. — Lawrence King ^(talk) 02:15, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Further checking shows you are correct about Ace and Ballantine issuing the series in two volumes, The Moon Maid and The Moon Men (with "The Red Hawk" included). I have annotated my initial comment above accordingly. BPK (talk) 15:21, 30 March 2009 (UTC)