Introduction

Planet Stories had both Candian and British reprint editions:

• PLN1 - Canadian edition, 12 issues 1948-51 by the American News Company of Toronto
• PLN2 - British edition, 12 issues 1950-54

PLN1 - Canadian edition

This edition can be dismissed fairly quickly as, according to Tuck, it was identical to the US edition both as to contents and to date. It isn't indexed or even mentioned by SFFWF. It corresponded with the US issues:

• 1948 Fall, Winter;
• 1949 Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter;
• 1950 Spring, Summer, Fall, November;
• 1951 January, March.

The only visible difference on the covers is that, at some point, the price increased ahead of the US editon to 25c and the Canadian price was printed in a small box over the US price. Tuck says this happened in Fall 1950, but the Spring 1950 cover certainly has this overprint. I haven't seen enough of them to say exactly when the change occurred. In view of the close similarity, I have not bothered to show the covers here.

PLN2 - British edition

This is more in the standard mould of early post-war British reprint editions, a greatly slimmed-down version of the original omitting much of its content. There were 12 issues published by Pembertons of Manchester. All were numbered but none were dated. Tuck says that #1 was published by Streamline Publications of London. I don't know what grounds he has for saying this - I have #1 right at hand and I can find no mention of Streamline; it cites Pembertons, just like all the others. From what I can determine, Streamline was at this time publishing comics and painting and colouring books, then later moved on to decidedly down-market paperbacks.

The publication schedule of the British edition was very irregular at first and there was a gap of more than two years between #4 and #5, after which it settled to a more or less bi-monthly routine. Nor were the US magazines reproduced in any particular sequence. Planet Stories was very unusual in one respect, however: every British issue drew its stories from a single US issue, though not the whole issue, of course - with only 64 pages at its disposal, at least one and usually several stories had to be dropped. It is actually more difficult to achieve this correspondence than one might imagine, as the printing and binding process requires a multiple of 16 pages and the stories have to be chosen to fill the space available. Almost all other titles did this by choosing stories of the appropriate length from alternative issues when none was available from the current US issue. In Planet stories, the page count must have been balanced by adjusting the advertisements and the illustrations. There was just one instance I could find, in #7, where a one-page non-fiction filler was dropped in which came, not from Planet, but from Startling Stories.

The artwork seems at first sight to be original, but I am not absolutely sure that it is in all cases. There have certainly been changes to the title texts to reflect the omission of some stories from the British issues, and that probably required some touching-up around the affected areas of the covers. One or two, however, have subtle variations in detail that lead one to suspect that they may have been repainted. It has been done, if it has been done, so very skilfully so that you can hardly tell the difference, but the jury is out on whether the front covers are original or not.

Source of images

Issue 1, 6 and 12 were copies offered for sale on eBay. The rest have been scanned from copies in my own collection.