The SF Site: Mark V. Ziesing Books

A number of years ago, the Ziesing Brothers operated a large bookstore in the college town of Willimantic, Connecticut. It stocked a wide range of titles but with a particular emphasis on SF, fantasy, horror, and the like. Mark Ziesing had built up a large local clientele along with a substantial mail order arm. They had tried their hand at some non-SF small press publishing when, one day, Mark decided to do Gene Wolfe's The Castle of the Otter. Its success led to a second book, The Wolfe Archipelago, which had double the print run of the first. These were the only two SF items done under the Ziesing Brothers imprint. Subsequent books have appeared with the Mark V. Ziesing Books logo. In 1989, Mark Ziesing and family moved from Willimantic back to his native state, California. The Book of the Dead was the final book published in Connecticut. Setting up a mail order business, as publisher and bookseller, became the principal focus.

Ziesing books can be purchased from a variety of sources. Mark supplies books to specialty book dealers around the world, his titles are available through online suppliers like amazon.com and, of course, directly from him. Ziesing limited editions come only direct, many of which are sold out immediately.

Mark V. Ziesing

Mark V. Ziesing Books Website

Books can be purchased from:
Mark V. Ziesing
P. O. Box 76
Shingletown, CA 96088
They accept Visa and MasterCard.
Phone & Fax: (530) 474-1580
Email :ziesingbooks@frontiernet.net

Mark V. Ziesing Books
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Mark V. Ziesing

The Anubis Gates (1989)
Tim Powers

Re-typset and reprinted 6 years after the paperback, The Anubis Gates, may become one of the modern classics. It won Tim Powers the Philip K. Dick Award for best novel to appear in paperback. This editon claims to restore "a passage of text missing from the paperback" which, rumour has it, is a paragraph somewhere.

We are introduced to a motley crew of characters including an ancient Egyptian sorcerer, a body-witching werewolf who kills his victims to keep his identity a secret, a girl disguised as a boy who hunts her lover's killer, a brainwashed Lord Byron who has been programmed to kill King George, a sinister modern-day millionaire who travels back to early 1800s England, and Professor Brendan Doyle, an innocent, who agrees to give a lecture on Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They set the stage for a cabal of black magicians who plot a ritual through the ages to open the gates into the next world. Plans are disrupted in the early 1800s by a series of strange events. Meanwhile, back in our day, our millionaire is creating a way to move through time and a literary expert is whisked back to the 1800s. Now, things get really complicated...

Book of the Dead (1989)
edited by John M. Skipp & Craig Spector

This original anthology of 16 stories is set in the world of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and has a foreword by Romero. For the few who haven't seen the film: the dead are returning to life and they want to eat those who have not yet died. Why and how are left to the viewers' imagination. And, as the dust jacket says, "readers are warned -- this is not for the young or the squeamish." Some have said that this is a horror fiction's equivalent of Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions series of anthologies. It contains the following stories:

Foreword by George A. Romero

Introduction: On Going Too Far by John M. Skipp & Craig Spector

Blossom by Chan McConnell

Mess Hall by Richard Laymon

It Helps If You Sing by Ramsey Campbell

Home Delivery by Stephen King

Wet Work by Philip Nutman

A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned by Edward Bryant

Bodies and Heads by Steve Rasnic Tem

Choices by Glen Vasey

The Good Parts by Les Daniels

Less Than Zombie by Douglas E. Winter

Like Pavlov's Dogs by Steven R. Boyett

Saxophone by Nicholas Royle

On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks by Joe R. Lansdale

Dead Giveaway by Brian Hodge

Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy by David J. Schow

Eat Me by Robert R. McCammon

Forthcoming Titles

Books slated for future release include:

A Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore edited by Mark V. Ziesing which features weird and dark stories about books and book collectors. Contributors include Thomas Ligotti, Brian Stableford, A.A. Attanasio, Patrick O'Leary, and several others.

A Handbook of American Prayer by Lucius Shepard is planned once the author finally turns in his manuscript.

Mark V. Ziesing

The State of the Art (1989)
Iain M. Banks

With his novel, Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks defined The Culture, a functioning utopia and a fully- realized society based on individual freedom, technological sophistication and seriously cool robots. The State of the Art, set on Earth of 1977, is the story of a man in love with life itself, an investigation into the nature of good and evil, a quest for reason in the face of the irrational. It adds to Culture lore by contrasting it to a familiar world using the remarkable wit and keen ear for dialogue that is a Banks trademark. This novella is one of 8 stories appearing in a book of the same name published by Orbit in the UK in 1991.

By Bizarre Hands (1989)
Joe R. Lansdale

This was the first collection of Lansdale stories, all but two are reprints and several have been revised for this book. It includes the Stoker Award-winning "Night They Missed The Horror Show." Lewis Shiner does the book's introduction. It collects the following stories:

Fish Night

The Pit

Duck Hunt

By Bizarre Hands

The Steel Valentine

I Tell You It's Love

Letter from the South, Two Moons West of Nacogdoches

Boys Will Be Boys

The Fat Man and the Elephant

Hell Through a Windshield

Down by the Sea Near the Great Big Rock

Trains Not Taken

Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back

The Windstorm Passes

Night They Missed the Horror Show

On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks

Trade Secrets: A Modern Melodrama (1990)
Ray Garton

Best known for his vampire novels, especially Live Girls, Ray Garton has given us a novel of psychological horror with elements that could be X-rated. Gerard Brady is a quiet, tidy man who minds his own business. Finding a beautiful sopping wet woman huddled in his garage triggers events which spin his neat existence out of control. He is drawn into the mayhem in order to save her from a monsterous conspiracy and he discovers secrets he may be better off not knowing.