Keep Circulating The Tapes / Literature

• Whenever a library gets destroyed, chances are that an ultra-rare book will be lost forever.
  • The Library of Alexandria, in Egypt, was destroyed in several incidents, most notably by Julius Caesar in 48 BC. Over 40,000 scrolls were lost.
  • In 2004, the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, in Germany, caught fire, destroying the main wing. 50,000 books were destroyed in the fire, a quarter of which were "irreplaceable". The library reopened in 2007, after $18 million in repairs, with undamaged and restored books, as well as replacements from donations, other libraries, and the antiques market.
• Books published between the 1860s-1970s (in some cases, even up until the late 1980s) that were printed on paper made from wood-pulp are irreversibly decaying, due to the chemicals used to bleach the pulp reacting with acids on human skin and in the atmosphere. Currently, the only solutions are to laminate the pages or scan them digitally, but given the sheer number of books the British Library or the Library of Congress hold, these programs will take decades to complete, and in the meantime, many books will become brittle to the point of disintegrating when touched.
• When American Girl, had historical character short stories taken out of the magazine and published separately, two of Kirsten's short stories ("Kirsten and the Thief" and "Kirsten's New Teacher") were not included in her set or reprinted. This is also true with the short plays for Kirsten, Molly, Samantha, and Felicity which were printed in the magazines and never reprinted elsewhere.
• Among the Babylon 5 canon novels, the Centauri Prime and Passing of the Techno-mages trilogies are among the better-reviewed and more storyline-essential ones but are out of print, and any fan who gets either complete trilogy for less than $100 is probably absurdly lucky.
• Ben Safford Mysteries: When all of Emma Lathen's (mostly rare and long out-of-print) books got Kindle releases, the first and fifth Stafford books, Murder: Sunny Side Up and Murder Out of Commission, were absent from the lineup, while two other Stafford novels got released on Kindle twice (one of them erroneously using the title of Murder Out of Commission).
• The Doctor Who Expanded Universe Eighth Doctor Adventures are out of print. There's 73 of them. You can buy them used, if you want, but even though there's so many, you'll never be able to find enough to ring up much of a bill. Your other option is downloading PDFs, and they're not hard to find. The only problem is that the OCR program used to transcribe the books isn't perfect, resulting in one novel having a character's name be misspelled two times, among other errors.
  • Additionally out of print are the Doctor Who New Adventures and Doctor Who Missing Adventures series, the Past Doctor Adventures series, and the original Target novelisations (except for a handful of PDAs and a chunk of novelisations that were released in new editions starting in the 2010s). The BBC Books novelisations - Douglas Adams' stories, Eric Saward's Dalek stories, and the revival series stories - are still in print, though.
  • Part of the problem is believed to be discomfort with just how Darker and Edgier many of these books were compared to the family-friendly nature of the new series prose spin-offs. Russell T Davies reportedly refused to allow the BBC to reprint his New Adventures novel Damaged Goods because he didn't want little kids reading it.
• Welcome to the NHK by Tatsuhiko Takimoto is out of print and despite the sheer fan veneration of the original book the manga and anime were based on, there's no word on when the light novel will be reprinted because the Tokyopop light novel line mostly folded. The sad thing is, out of all the light novels ever released in English, Welcome to the NHK was special because it was for its time one of the only ways young people found out about the hikikomori phenomenon, since this concept was so niche, and yet the book badly marketed this aspect.
• Dick Tracy: The Novelization is easy enough to find, but its sequels, Dick Tracy Goes to War and Dick Tracy Meets His Match, while decently regarded, only had one limited printing and are rare and expensive collector's items.
• The notoriously rare Final Destination: Death of the Senses, the last Final Destination novel published by the now defunct Black Flame, was only on the market for a short time before being recalled due to a printing error, and it's almost impossible to get a physical copy of it. (As one website put it — "getting your hands on a copy is like cutting off your own hand with a rubber spatula... it can be done, but it isn't easy...")
• J. D. Salinger wrote a number of short stories other than the ones collected in Nine Stories, and blew off publishers who wanted to reprint them. So resourceful fans tracked down the magazines in which these stories originally appeared, and circulated photocopies of these.
  • And that's counting the ones he published. All his unpublished stories made before the release of The Catcher in the Rye were donated to the library at Princeton Univeristy with extreme regulations so that they can only be read by qualified patrons of the University in a separate room supervised by the library without any recording devices or writing implements, and can only legally published 50 years after his death (meaning the earliest it can be published is January 27, 2060). But there are a few major exceptions: in 1999, three of the unpublished stories ("Paula", "Birthday Boy", and "The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls", the latter is notable because parts of it were rewritten for the scenes in ''Catcher'' where Holden Caulfield talks about the death of his younger brother) were given an EXTREMELY small print run under the title Three Stories, and were promptly forgotten about until a copy appeared on eBay in 2013. ^note  By the time the Three Stories book was discovered, Salinger had been deceased for three years, and even while he was alive he was the poster child for the Reclusive Artist trope, so it's pretty much impossible to tell if he approved of this small print run, if he even knew it existed, or how the publishers got hold of the stories if it wasn't authorized by Salinger considering the secrecy surrounding them From there, they were uploaded onto various torrent trackers and can still be easily found with a little know-how, the rest of the stories are still unaccounted for.
• The Dragonlance Kingpriest Trilogy is currently out of print, and shows no signs of going back into print any time soon. Which is a shame because it is one of the best trilogies in the entire novel line.
• The Great Brain: Uncle Will and the Fitzgerald Curse (the book in the series with the most adult content) has been out of print for decades, has yet to get an ebook, can’t be found in many libraries, and (as of 2023) has no copies for sale online for cheaper than $200.
• Back in the 50s, the Stratemeyer Syndicate began to rewrite and shorten The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books to remove outdated slang and terms (ie: "chum", "roadster", etc.), politically incorrect villains, racist terms, etc., and took the old editions off the market. Then, from 1991 to 2007, a publisher by the name of Applewood Books reprinted the first 16 Hardy Boys books and the first 21 Nancy Drew books with the original dust jackets and bindings. However, these have gone out of print (most can still be bought new), and the only way to get the original editions of the remaining books is to buy older editions from antique stores and eBay. Oddly enough, in-book ads for the original canon tout the revised books (plus the 20 or so that came after) as "The Originals"...
• Similar to the Dahmer example above, Noreen Gosch self published “Why Johnny Can’t Come Home,” a book about the famous disappearance of her son Johnny Gosch. It included claims that her son had visited her long after her disappearance and was kidnapped by a “global pedophile ring.” It was published in 2000 but is now out of print.
• Swans leader Michael Gira's short-story anthology The Consumer was published in the 1990s by 2.13.61 and is now out of print. The book can fetch high prices and is considered to be one of the most disturbing books ever released. You can find scans of it online, if you have the stomach for it.
• The compilation of stories under Stephen King's Pen Name Richard Bachman (The Bachman Books) has been out of print for many years. This is due to the fact that one of the included stories, Rage (1977) (in which a student holds his class hostage at gunpoint after shooting two teachers), was found in the locker of a student who committed a school shooting in 1997. When King learned that his story may have had some connection to the event he requested that it go out of print. While finding the other Bachman stories in the collection is not difficult, the only ways to find Rage are old copies and Internet reproductions.
• Thomas Ligotti's classic Songs of a Dead Dreamer was printed in minuscule numbers, as was its revised 1989 edition. A handful of the stories are anthologized or available online, but the book as a whole is a highly valued rarity. Penguin has since released a new version.
• Any book that, for any reason, goes out of print, can become this, as can books which make significant changes between editions. For example, any of the pre-1951 printings of The Hobbit sell for much more money than those of the later editions, since they contain the original Chapter 5, where Gollum was friendly and offered to give Bilbo the Ring. This was then revised to fit better with the new story Tolkien was writing. Since there were only 4 printings, and many of those were destroyed in war-time, they are very rare.
• The Campbell era of Astounding Science Fiction. Although many of the more popular stories are reprinted in anthologies, the only issues which are available as eTexts are from before Campbell took over, and no true compilation volumes have ever been printed. There was for a time in the 1950s a British reprint edition of Astounding. Copies of this seem to turn up fairly frequently in the UK, although issues may omit some content from the originals.
• The Fox and the Hound may have a Disney movie very loosely based on its title, but hasn't been in print for decades (though it has been available as an ebook since 2013).
• Some of Jules Verne's more obscure books have only been published in English once, at the turn of the 20th century. Very few new translations have ever popped up of these works since then. On top of that, these early English translations are known for their low quality. So unless you can read French, your only choices to read these obscure Verne works is to wait for new English translations or to suffer through the horrible old English ones, assuming you can find one at a used bookstore or public library.
• Everything that K. A. Applegate and Michael Grant wrote together in The '90s and early 2000's (Animorphs, Everworld, and Remnants) are out of print - Animorphs got a re-release of the first eight books, but that's it. They can all be obtained legally through Amazon or other sites, but usually only for an exorbitant price,^note book #51 alone can go for over $50 especially if you want a new edition. However, it's quite easy to find copies online, and both authors have explicitly stated that these illegal copies are what keep the series alive.
  • Animorphs graphic novel adaptations started being released in 2020, and have been confirmed through at least book #5.
  • In 2021, Grant and Applegate announced that they'd regained the rights to Remnants and Everworld, and will be selling digital and print-on-demand copies.
• The Terran Trade Authority books: They featured art by Chris Foss, Peter Elson, Angus McKie and several other popular Science Fiction artists from The '70s. The four volumes of the original may go for as much as two hundred dollars. The first two volumes had a 2006 reprint; however, the original art was replaced by CGI recreations due to the fact that all of the art used in the originals was actually art created for science fiction books of The '70s and the rights to all the illustrations belong to the many individual artists. Also, the narrative backstory was updated and reimagined to include explicit references to real-life current events such as 9/11 and the anti-Bush/anti American sentiment of the 2000s. This political pandering was met with criticism by readers who felt that the original's deliberate distance from contemporary issues and politics was part of its escapist charm.
• Now that BIONICLE is officially over, the only way to read any of the chapter books or guides is to buy them used. At least you can find all the comics online....
• Worlds Deadliest Fighting Secrets by Count Dante: Deadliest Man Alive. Actually more of a booklet that was advertised in comic books during The '60s and The '70s. Although there really was a guy (real name John Keehan) calling himself Count Dante, no one actually ever took his claims seriously, and it is highly suspected that sales of the booklet were immensely exaggerated. Although the so-called Kata Dante (Dance of Death) can be learned from several other sources, it is rare to encounter anyone who claims to have a copy of it or the free Black Dragon Fighting Society membership card that came with it. Self proclaimed Ninja Master Ashida Kim does claim to possess a copy, and he has posted photos of his BDFS membership card online. Make of that what you will.
• The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, commissioned by Betty and Ian Ballantine and edited by Lin Carter, reprinted many classic fantasy novels and story collections with imaginative wrap-around cover art and brand-new introductions. Some of these titles are now widely available in other editions, such as The Lord of the Rings and Gormenghast, while others (anything by Hannes Bok, for instance) continue to languish out of print — unsurprisingly, given that the series had a low print run and did not sell well, so collecting the entire BAF library is a rare achievement. And if you do manage to acquire the complete Ballantine Adult Fantasy line, congratulations on your beautiful bookshelf. (For decades, the line's two H. P. Lovecraft anthologies, The Doom That Came to Sarnath and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, were still in print albeit with different cover art, but they, too, recently entered this trope.)
• Jane Gaskell's singularly strange Atlan series, which consists of either four or five novels, depending on which printings you read, went through several different editions in the U.K. and U.S....and has yet to see the light of day since the 1980s.
• Many popular YA series in the 80s and 90s like Sweet Valley High and The Babysitters Club are out of print. Fans can still occasionally find them at used book stores or garage sales for not a lot of money or on the web for a few (sometimes many) dollars more. In the case of SVH, the first 4 books were re-released in 2008 and updated to modern times, but these are also now hard to find. When the SVH sequel The Sweet Life came out as an e-book in 2012, the first 12 books of SVH were also re-released as e-books with different covers but with the original stories intact.
• The horridly infamous The Legend of Rah and the Muggles is sought after by many curious people who see if the book is really that bad, but only two printing runs were made, one in 1984 and another in 2001; both of these runs only printed a few thousands books and sold poorly because of lack of publicity in the former case and the author's infamy caused by her lawsuit against J.K. Rowling in the latter. Some illegal copies are available on Amazon, but the real deal is near impossible to find.
• Although Linda Goodman's two extraordinarily popular astrology books — Linda Goodman's Sun Signs and Linda Goodman's Love Signs — have remained healthily in print despite all their dated elements, the third, more generally occultic book in the trilogy, Linda Goodman's Star Signs, has not. Neither has her Brobdingagian autobiography, Gooberz, which is odd when one considers that her slimmer book of astrologically themed love poetry, Venus Trines At Midnight, is still in print. In fact, neither Linda Goodman's Star Signs nor Gooberz has an electronic version. Not to worry, though—the seeker can find the former book for very low prices on virtually every online used bookstore and in many of their brick-and-mortar counterparts, and the latter book isn't too much more difficult to track down. The books Goodman listed in her bibliographies, however, are a different story. (Amusingly, in both Love Signs and Star Signs, Goodman suggests that the reader "write to the publisher and urge republication" should a book they desire be out of print.)
• Several of the books of Eden Phillpotts are now available in electronic format, and many are in the public domain to boot. But he was a ludicrously prolific author (his writing career spanned nearly six decades), and plenty of his works remain scarce. And even if Lin Carter had reprinted Phillpotts's fantasy titles as planned, they would still fall under this trope.
• Fear Street: The last five Sagas books are unavailable on the Kindle, and paper copies are few and expensive (with copies ranging from $41 to $200). Some of the Seniors books can be equally hard to get.
• The Cult Classic War of Powers series by Robert Vardeman and Victor Milan has long been out of print. You might conceivably find individual novels in the series at used bookstores, or you can go the route of buying the two omnibus editions online, which are also out of print.
• Robert Adams' Horseclans series. Most of the books have not been reprinted.
• The Man Who Brought the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn by David Ritz never saw a print run after the early 1980s, and is currently unavailable as an ebook, but it isn't very difficult to buy a used copy online.
• The 2000s saw two short stories written under the V. C. Andrews name (Actually by her ghostwriter, Andrew Neiderman) inspired by two of her paintings; The Little Psychic and Cage of Love, both in eBook format. These stories were available for a short time for free at the Simon & Schuster website and were supposed to be the start of a new series of V.C. Andrews short stories. For some reason, the stories were eventually removed from the site and the planned series never saw the light of day. That said, it isn't too hard to find either story if you know where to look (Just don't expect a physical publication anytime soon).
  • Another VCA example is Gathering Clouds, a 48-page prequel to the Hudson Series. It was only included with the DVD of the film adaptation of Rain and nowhere else, not even in eBook form. You could just get a copy of the DVD... But some newer copies don't contain Gathering Clouds. The official VCA Facebook mentioned the possibility of it being reissued as a download, but that was in 2011 with no word since.
  • In order to promote Christopher's Diary: Secrets of Foxworth (Basically Flowers in the Attic told in Chris's point of view), the VCA Fan Page would give anyone who could prove they pre-ordered the book a short letter 'written' by Christopher Sr. meant for Corrine that revealed that he knew that they were brother and sister. After the promotion ended the letter was not given out or published. Like the aforementioned short stories, this one isn't too hard to find.
• Teaser and the Firecat by Cat Stevens. No, not the album — the children's book, which is why it's under "Literature." It's been out of print since the mid-70's, making it a great collector's item. The album, however, is alive and well as are its three classic hits: "Morning Has Broken," "Moonshadow" (which titled a cartoon based on the book) and "Peace Train."
• Oh yes, you all know about Dumbo thanks to what Walt Disney gave us. Finding the children's book it's based on, which has only eight pages and very little text, isn't quite so easy.
• Some of Rosemary Wells's older books from the 70's and 80's (Especially the original copies of Max and Ruby from the late 70's) are out of print. Some of her older books get reprints with new covers in later years with new artwork. In recent years, some books like "Noisy Nora" (which is one of Rosemary's first books) get a newer art style compared to their previous look from the 70's and 80's.
• Earl Mac Rauch, screenwriter and co-creator of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, wrote a pair of outlandish experimental novels in the late 60's and early 70's, Dirty Pictures from the Prom and Arkansas Adios. The former features weird metafictional trickery, such as crossed out pages and deleted chapters, as well as crude sexual humor, and both books never got past their first editions, becoming extremely difficult to find.
• Around the same time the economist Joel Kurtzman began his writing career with two surreal, poetically intense novels, Crown of Flowers and Sweet Bobby. Neither one saw good sales, the latter never making it past its first edition, and both have been out of print since the early 70's.
• Legendary Hollywood director Richard Brooks (Elmer Gantry, etc.) tried his hand at literature before becoming a director - his first novel, The Brick Foxhole, was an existentialist portrait of WWII soldiers stuck on base feeling estranged from their purpose, culminating in the murder of a gay man in the town their base is located and the murder's aftermath. An important early story revolving around hate crimes, the book was adapted into the noir film Crossfire, albeit the murder victim changed from being gay to being Jewish and the perspective switched from the soldiers to police officers investigating the crime. The hate crime angle was retained, however, and the film was highly acclaimed for that aspect of the story. The book has been out of print for at least 70 years and the hardcover copies are quite expensive.
• The sequels to the children's classic All-of-a-Kind Family have been out-of-print for a while. They were released on Kindle, but that doesn't satisfy many of the more old-fashioned fans. They are murmuring about a re-release though.
• The Last Valley: While the film is easy to find, the original novel, despite its high esteem among fans of the genre, has been out of print for decades, lacks an ebook, and can only be obtained by people with a membership in certain libraries or over a hundred dollars to spend on a used copy.
• Perry Rhodan: Germany's own Space Opera novella series. Going strong since 1961 and still going today with over 2800 volumes. The American translation (spearheaded by the legendary Forrest J. Ackerman) published by Ace Books, only lasted 120 volumes from 1969 to 1979. Rumor has it that although Perry gained a cult following in the U.S., the publisher disliked pulp space opera, thus the cancellation. The Outdated Future, White Male-centrism, and general Values Dissonance of that older series won't endear it to newer, younger readers, which rules out reprints. There was also a short lived series in 1990. Good luck finding those old editions in English. Used editions have shown up online for reasonable prices per book (typically not much more than 10 US dollars). They tend to be in various states of decay due to the extremely cheap paper on which they were printed. You could always learn German, though, and see if you have any luck finding old issues or reprints of those old outdated adventures.
• Dutch children's novel Karel En De Kindermoordenaar (Karel And The Child Murderer) by author Dolf Verroen is the only one of his books to have never been reprinted due to its dark subject matter.
• Leo Szilard was a physicist, a student and peer of Albert Einstein, and wrote Einstein's famous letter to President Roosevelt that led to the Manhattan Project. Szilard's complicated feelings about his role in the development of the atomic bomb and the Cold War led him to write a book of science fiction short stories, The Voice of Dolphins, exploring those themes. It has long been out of print.
• Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants by John D. Clark and The Green Flame: Surviving Government Secrecy by Andrew Dequasie are fascinating books about the history of the US aerospace and rocketry programs during the Atomic Age. Unfortunately, both books are long out of print and only available used or downloaded electronically...if that. However, Ignition! was eventually re-released on May 16, 2018.
• Not counting its being published with a different cover in the UK in 1969, The Clone by Theodore L. Thomas and Kate Wilhelm hasn't been reprinted since it initially debuted in paperback form in 1965, despite being nominated for a Nebula Award. There was an Italian language version published in 2008, translated by Beata della Frattina and titled simply "Clone," but that's about it, and there's no noise in the pipeline about any reprints. Fortunately, the original English language paperbacks are relatively plentiful on the secondary market and not terribly expensive.
• The Joseph Payne Brennan short story collections Nine Horrors and a Dream (Arkham House/Ballantine, 1958) and The Shapes of Midnight (Berkeley, 1980) have been out of print since they were initially published, and command rather high prices on the secondary market. However, both books are apparently due to be reprinted in 2019 by Dover, in June and July, respectively.
• Another horror book commanding high prices on the secondary market is Pierce Nace's gorefest Eat Them Alive. Whether the original 1977 American Manor publication (which is rarer) or the NEL one for the UK published the same year, the book can go for $100 or more on eBay. Like Thomas and Wilhelm's The Clone, there is no forthcoming suggestion that it's up for a reprint.
  • That said, there is a German reprint now.
• Zig-Zagged by the works of E. E. "Doc" Smith. While it's (relatively) easy to find his works in ebook and digital audiobook form, good luck tracking down any hard copies of installments of the Lensman series and the Skylark Series, Spacehounds of IPC, or The Galaxy Primes to give the best-known examples. Along with the usual Values Dissonance and writing style that is clunky by today's standards, Smith's works have been Lost in Imitation. Despite being the first Space Opera universe to feature Worldbuilding, Lesnman, especially, has been eclipsed by franchises such as Star Wars and Star Trek both of which instead get hailed as the uber examples of Space Opera.
• No works by the Belgian illustrator and author Jean de Bosschère remain in official print editions, including two very strange, surreal fantasy novels for children, The City Curious (1920) and Weird Islands (1921). Each book features at least one lush illustration on each two-page spread, and the worlds created in them are unique among 20th-century fantasy literature. Because of their artistic quality and rarity, original copies regularly fetch $50-$100 online.
• English translations of the Belgian fantasist Jean Ray are notoriously difficult to get, such as his gothic novel Malpertuis, translated in the 1990's by Atlas Press and unavailable ever since. A 1965 collection of his stories, Ghouls In My Grave, can fetch asking prices of over $100 from online sellers, despite being a cheaply-produced pocket paperback. Wakefield Press began newly translating his work in 2019, so this entry may be unnecessary soon enough.
• "Pernkopf's Atlas" is the best book of human anatomy: the most detailed, accurate and complete, and leading surgeons swear by it. It has been out of print since the 1990s. The problem is that Dr Pernkopf was a dedicated Nazi, and the raw material for his team of dissectors and illustrators was a steady stream of executed prisoners, at least some of whom were political prisoners; and the circumstances of its creation eventually either came to light or became impossible to ignore. Second hand copies sell for thousands of dollars, because that's what highly paid people are willing to pay for a high-quality tool used for important work.
• Mailed Fist, a World War 2 memoir by John Foley. The book is long out of print, and there is no electronic edition. In spring 2020, sellers on Amazon UK were asking £99 for paperback copies.
• Maude Crowley's Azor books (like Azor and the Blue-Eyed Cow and Azor and the Haddock) have been out of print for decades, partly because they've had to switch publishers a few times, and partly because of Creator Provincialism; the books make a lot of references to things in Marblehead, Massachusetts.
• The Clique has been out of print for years. However, it did sell a lot of copies during its heyday, so finding them in used bookstores, online, or at the library is usually doable.
• The Pinkerton Diaries is a compilation of diary entries, song notes, emails, and essays, photos, and various other documents from Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo after he released Weezer (The Blue Album), and up to when they went on their first hiatus. The book is considered to be a valuable insight into Rivers' life when he wrote Songs From The Black Hole, which soon evolved into Pinkerton. However, only 3,000 copies were ever produced (500 of those copies also came with an exclusive poster), and is now a highly sought-after collector's item going for hundreds of dollars. It was never re-released in any fashion, not even in eBook form. For the longest time, it was the only way to legally obtain a copy of Alone III (the third in a series of Rivers Cuomo demo collections) until the demos were made more widely available on other demo compilations.
• Dav Pilkey pulled the Captain Underpants spin-off book The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future from publication in 2021 due to concerns of “perpetuating passive racism” against Asians.
• Out of the five Quantum Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner books, only the first two have been translated into English, and both of those have long been sold out. There's no indication that they'll be reprinted, and even when a used copy does show up, get ready to pay high prices for them. Your only options are to either know Japanese and import the books or look for fan translations.
• Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future has been out of print for decades, likely due to Creator Backlash. It's still available online, though.
• In 2006, a biography of Brazilian singer Roberto Carlos was released. One year later, legal action took it out of bookshelves (the resulting outcry even resulted in the Congress approving a law in 2015 that allowed biographies without authorization from the subject). Used copies reach prices in the triple digits. The author eventually wrote a book about the whole affair and what happened after the lawsuit, as well another biography with Carlos' approval, split into two books (the first part came out in 2021).
• How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life was removed from publication and all shelf copies were destroyed due to prolific accusations of plagiarism, so it can be difficult to find copies nowadays; a few readers have mentioned that their local public libraries still have a copy or two, used copies can be found on Amazon and some internet archives have also uploaded the book.
• The Railway Series:
  • The Three Railway Engines and Thomas the Tank Engine originally had illustrations respectively by William Middleton and Reginald Payne, but C. Reginald Dalby redrew the former book's illustrations and modified the latter's around 1950. The "Dalby editions" have been in wide circulation, thus forcing the "originals" out of print.
  • Henry the Green Engine had to be modified after the Rev. W. Awdry gained controversy in 1972 for a use of the N-word in "Henry's Sneeze," the book's last story. All editions have since said "black as soot" instead of the original phrase.
• Rick Brant: While most of the books have multiple printings and several have ebooks, the last few books in the series have been out of print and unavailable in other mediums for a long time, and, as of 2023, it is impossible to find a copy of the final book, The Magic Talisman, for sale online for less than $1,000.
• Teen Power Inc.: While the series remains fairly popular, it has yet to receive an ebook release and many of the books only got one or two printings, and most of those were in Australia, making copies of a little over half of the books in the series difficult to buy even in Australia, let alone other countries.
• Jiří Kulhánek: Vládci strachu ("Rulers of Fear") and Cesta krve ("The Path of Blood") are hopelessly out of print and not likely to be reissued.

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