It is a truth universally acknowledged by Stephen King collectors that the US/UK trade editions were not the “World First Edition” of IT (publication date: 15 September 1986), that honor went to the famous German “Bootleg” limited edition of ES by Edition Phantasia which was shipped out in May 1986. On the last page of IT, King wrote the date on which he finished the novel, 28 December 1985. You might ask yourself: how can anyone translate a 1000+ page novel into another language in just two or three months? The answer is simple: you can’t—not even with German efficiency. The fact is that the German translation that was published that May was a translation of the first draft of IT, instead of King’s third and final draft, which he finished in late December 1985—a text which underwent even more changes during the editing and proofing process at Viking in the first months of 1986.

The German publisher Heyne Verlag came to an agreement with King’s agent to buy the translation rights to the book at some point in 1983 or ’84. Because they wanted ES to come out at the same time as the US/UK editions, they got express permission from King’s agent to make a translation based on an early draft. Heyne then sold the limited edition rights to Edition Phantasia, who later put the following description of the limited edition on their website:

Published six months before the American edition and following a manuscript which was authorized by King’s agent for translation, but later revised by the author, thus differing from the American edition.^​1​

With this arrangement, the German translator Alexandra von Reinhardt had most likely received a photocopy of King’s first draft typescript by the end of 1984 at the latest, and could take a whole year to work on her translation for Heyne. In the meantime, however, King had done two more drafts of IT; making countless changes. When a photocopy of the unedited third draft arrived in Germany in early 1986, I’m sure there was quite a rushed atmosphere in the office at Heyne. They sped through the text looking for significant differences. It turned out King had written a whole new chapter: chapter 2, “After the Festival” (the Adrian Mellon chapter). Alexandra von Reinhardt translated that chapter, and for the text of the rest of the novel, she made quite random choices of where to update her translation and where to just leave it as it was.

As a result, the text of the first editions of ES (limited, hardback and paperback) was about 1/5th shorter than the American version. German readers read about Beverly and her husband Tom Huggins (not Rogan), about Dakin’s Sporting Goods (instead of Machen’s), about Al Brady (instead of Bradley)—to name just three of the names that occurred in King’s first draft and were later changed.

In a short piece on this remarkable translation, King scholar Michael R. Collings writes that the translator abridged King’s text from 1138 pages to 860.^​2​ That is certainly how it appears when you put the two versions side by side, but in actual fact it was the other way around, the differences reflect how King expanded the text of his first draft in his two subsequent drafts. Collings discusses a passage, which I will add here in its German translation^​3​ versus how it appeared in the Viking US first edition^​4​.

Collings states that the translator abridged this passage by cutting an exchange between Richie and Eddie that was quite important in terms of characterization, and that she erroneously attributed “keep that aspirator thing handy” to Richie, while it should have been Beverly. In this case however, the German version is an accurate translation of King’s first draft, and it was King who, in his second and third drafts, changed Richie to Beverly and added extra dialogue between Richie and Eddie. This was simply one of the many passages that was’t updated, because of time constraints, when the translator received that final draft in early 1986.

So, to anyone who wants to read King’s first draft of IT: you can—just find an 1980’s copy of ES. A few years later, in 1990, a new edition was published in which the text was retranslated by Joachim Körber—who is also one of the three people behind Edition Phantasia—so that it would match the US version word for word. Heyne published a “jubileum edition” to mark that occasion.

When the German limited edition came out in May 1986, King was surprised, and not pleased at all. Edition Phantasia claims that Heyne was at fault, for selling them the limited edition rights without clearing this with King’s representation first.^​5​ Initially, King didn’t undertake steps to stop the publication because it was a German book limited to 250 copies and would have no impact on the launch of the novel in the US/UK. But later that same year, 1986, Edition Phantasia published another King limited edition, Nebel, a German translation of The Mist, and again Heyne failed to request permission from King beforehand. This time, King did intervene: “Nearly the whole edition [of 500 copies] was destroyed on command of the author”, reported Edition Phantasia.^​1​ They were actually planning another limited edition at the time, a translation of King’s The Eyes of the Dragon, but decided it was best to cancel that project altogether. The fifteen illustrations already made by artist Johann Peterka were published as a stand-alone art portfolio, limited to 100 copies, in 1987.

All of this illustrates King’s enormous popularity in Germany. Heyne has been publishing King’s novels since 1978. It is notable that Heyne went to such lengths to offer ES to German readers at the same time as IT would come out in the US and UK. And it is just as notable that King(‘s agent) would authorize a translation based on the first draft of the novel to make that possible.