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.
Continue reading The First German Edition of IT Was a Translation of King’s First Draft