“The Curse of Lono” was conceived after Thompson was asked by Running Magazine to go to Hawaii to cover the Honolulu marathon. He decided he wanted to bring Ralph Steadman who did the fantastic illustrations. Naturally things took a turn for the interesting.

The Curse of Lono. Ⓒ 1983 Hunter S.Thompson

(1983) New York. Bantam Books. First edtion. Quite a large, thin softcover 10 X 7 inches. No hardcover was issued at the time. At least 11 prints of this edition were published.

(1983) London. Picador. First UK edition. Softcover. Almost identical to Bantam edition in cover-design and size.

(2005) London Taschen. Hardcover with dust jacket. First Taschen print. Large book 15 X 11 inches. The ISBN number is 10 digits long which indicates it was assigned before 2007. The ISBN number ends with the number 2 which is a quick way to identify a First Taschen edition.

(2005) London Taschen. Limited Edition. Hardcover with dust jacket in large orange slipcase, all enclosed in brown cardboard box. Special edition of 1000 copies. Signed by Thompson and Steadman, full signatures. Excellent piece. Also with illustrations by Steadman that don’t appear in original edition.

(2006) Special memorial edition. 8 1/2 X 11 inch sheets riveted together. Signed by Steadman on the night of the HST memorial. Also signed by Kurt Vonnegut. Also included is a signed print by Steadman along with a bunch of other souvenirs from that night. All enclosed in a clam-shell box. A mighty addition for a HST collector.

(2007) London.Tashen. Hardcover with dust jacket. Second Taschen print. Identical to the 2005 edition. The best way to tell them apart at a glance is this edition’s ISBN number has 13 digits (indicating the number was assigned after January 1st 2007) and ends with the number 5.

(2011) Munich. Heyne. Softcover. German edition. Different artwork to all other editions which until now have been similar. Translated by Teja Schwaner and Alexander Wagner.

(2014) Taschen GmbH. Germany. Hardcover. No dust jacket. Orange spine. English language. 11 inches long x 8.5 inches wide.

Note. With the Taschen editions the copyright pages are at the back of the book.

Compilation, format & synopsis © Martin Flynn 2011