Introduction

There were both Canadian and British reprint editions of Startling Stories

• STS1 - Canadian edition, 22 issues by three different Toronto publishers
• STS2 - 18 issues by Pembertons of Manchester

STS1 - Canadian edition

There is not a great deal to say about this series as, according to Tuck it was identical to the US edition except that the pages were half a an inch longer. He says that the publication schedule was:

• 1945 Summer, Fall
• 1946 Winter, Spring, Summer Fall
  (Publication Enterprises, Ltd)

• 1948 May, July, September
  (Pines Publications, Ltd)

• 1949 March, May, July, September, November
• 1950 January, March, May, July, September, November
• 1951 January
  (Better Publications of Canada, Ltd)

which is only 21 issues, but I don't know where the discrepancy with Tuck's 22 lies. The Clute & Nicholls encyclopaedia also claims 22 issues. I have only seen a few of these and the main difference, up to to 1948, anyway, is the blue band across the bottom exhorting readers to invest in Canada's future and buy Victory Bonds (later, Savings Bonds). I have reproduced just one of these covers here, that for Fall 1946. Besides the blue band, you should also just see a price annotation saying "9d in Gt. Br.", right next to the date. This was well before the British edition proper was published.

STS2 - British edition

Pembertons published eighteen issues in their reprint edition of Startling Stories between 1949 and 1954, initially about two issues a year, then settling on an approximately bimonthly schedule from June 1952 onwards. This edition had for the most part only 64 pages and was therefore a pale and slender imitation of the original, which was usually at least twice as thick. Many issues only carried a couple of stories and some only one. While the lead story was most often the lead from the corresponding US issue, or at least a story from it, this was not always the case. #16, for example, gets not a single story from the issue from which it borrows its cover, October 1953, but is entirely made up of stories from the April and December 1952 issues. While most issues derive the bulk of their content from a single US issue, in many instances a story has been substituted to make the BRE page count come out right.

This means, of course, that the title text on the cover has had to be adjusted in most cases. Nevertheless, I think the original artwork has been used. I can't be absolutely sure about this as I don't have two corresponding issues to compare side-by-side, but such minor differences as I can see in the images I have could easily be accounted for by the printing process. Many of the UK covers seem to be poorly printed and slightly out of register. The spines of #1 and 2, incidentally, carry the odd misprint "Scientification At Its Best", but by #3 the error had been spotted and corrected.

Source of Images

All of the images are scanned from copies in my own collection, with the exception of #11 which comes from a copy offered for sale on eBay.