The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition (Signed limited edition)

New York: Doubleday, 1990. Signed limited edition. Fine/Fine. One of 1,250 copies signed by Stephen King and artist Berni Wrightson. A Fine copy in like publisher's glassine dust jacket. Publisher's full black leather. Housed in the publisher's black wooden "coffin" case.

When Stephen King brought his manuscript for The Stand to Doubleday in 1978, the story was over 450,000 words long (about 1,200 pages). The publisher warned that the production cost of such a long book would push the retail price too high for consumers, so King made major edits, cutting the manuscript down by a third. For the "complete and uncut edition" of The Stand, published in 1990, King restored most of the removed material - 323 pages - and made a few additional edits, like revising the order of the chapters and moving the date of the pandemic forward ten years, from 1980 to 1990, to match the new publication date.

The Stand is a classic of apocalyptic horror. When a strain of influenza modified for biological warfare is accidentally released, an apocalyptic global pandemic ensues. With 99.4% of the human population killed, the world's few survivors face confusion, grief, and widespread violence. In a 2008 interview, King explained that he was inspired to write the novel by a news story on biological warfare: "I saw a 60 Minutes segment on CBW [chemical-biological warfare]. I never forgot the gruesome footage of the test mice shuddering, convulsing, and dying..." The novel also marks the first appearance of King's recurring character, Randall Flagg, who would later reappear as an antagonist in The Eyes of the Dragon (1984) and the Dark Tower series (1982 - 2012). Fine in Fine dust jacket.