Puck Aleshire's Abecedary

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an interior illustration

Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary (2000)^[1] by Michael Swanwick, a collection of short-short stories (one for each letter of the alphabet), initially ran in The New York Review of Science Fiction at a rate of one per month for 26 months starting with NYRSF Issue 111, November 1997.^[2] Each story was accompanied by a collage illustration by NYRSF editor Kathryn Cramer.^[3] Dragon Press, owned by NYRSF publisher David G. Hartwell, collected these stories in a single volume entitled Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary.^[4]

There were two editions, a carefully handbound edition produced for Dragon Press by Henry Wessels with linen cloth spine with handmade paper-covered boards and endpapers with deckled edge,^[5] and a trade paperback edition printed by Odyssey Press in New Hampshire, which also prints The New York Review of Science Fiction.

Cover art, interior illustration, and book design of both editions are by Kathryn Cramer. Swanwick published a subsequent volume of short-shorts, which initially appeared on the website The Infinite Matrix and were collected as The Periodic Table of Science Fiction.