“It is the colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of bone, resting on each arm of a seat which has been carved from a single, massive ruby.”

The six volumes in Chronicles of Elric—comprising short stories, novelettes, interludes, and novels—tell the dark and storied saga of Elric, the doomed emperor of a dying race and bearer of the soul-devouring blade, Stormbringer.

Set within a multiverse shaped by arcane forces, ancient empires, and cosmic imbalance, the Elric stories shattered the conventions of sword and sorcery. Moorcock’s melancholy hero—philosopher, sorcerer, outcast—helped redefine fantasy literature, offering a complex counterpoint to the archetypal hero and inspiring generations of writers, artists, and game designers.

At once villain and victim, Elric is a study in contradiction: a man who despises the empire he rules, who longs for justice while serving Chaos, who hungers for love yet brings ruin to all he touches. His story is a meditation on power, fate, and the fragile boundaries of identity in a world governed by forces far beyond mortal control.

Whether you’re discovering Elric for the first time or have long known his tale, Chronicles of Elric offers a definitive journey through one of speculative fiction’s most enduring and influential myths.

Volume I: Elric of Melniboné

Master of Chaos opens the volume long before Elric’s birth, as Earl Aubec of Malador is sent to claim Castle Kaneloon at the very edge of the world.

In The Folk of the Forest, the young Elric and his tutor Tanglebones, lost in the uncharted interior of the Dragon Isle, are drawn into an ancient war.

And So the Great Emperor Received His Education... is a brief interlude on the dream couches of Imrryr, where the heirs of the Sorcerer Kings live a thousand years in a single night.

And Elric of Melniboné, the first full-length novel and the foundation of the saga, follows Elric from the Ruby Throne of a decadent empire he cannot love, through his cousin Yyrkoon’s treachery and a pact with Arioch, to the black runesword Stormbringer—the blade that will sustain him, and damn him, for the rest of his days.

(We have another long write-up today as we’d like to talk about all the amazing work everyone involved has put in.)

Edition Details

Elric of Melniboné by Michael Moorcock is issued in three states: the Collector’s Edition of 500 copies; the Deluxe Edition of 250 copies; and the Lettered Edition of 26 copies.

A brief overview of the edition, with additional details below:

• Binding Design: All three bindings are designed by Tony Geer.
• Artwork: Greg Rutkowski has contributed eight full illustrations to the edition: seven single-page illustrations and a double-page spread.
• Calligraphy and Decorations: The hand-drawn calligraphy and decorations throughout are by Svetlana Molodchenko.
• Typography: Interior design and typography are by Emily Benton.
  
• Printing: Letterpress printing by Nomad Letterpress on the following papers:
  • Collector’s Edition: Munken Pure Rough Cream 120gsm.
  • Deluxe Edition: Custom Hahnemühle Ingres 120gsm mould-made paper with deckled edges.
  • Lettered Edition: Custom handmade 110gsm paper with deckled edges made from 100% cotton.
    
• Binding: All three states handbound by Ludlow Bookbinders in England.
• Format: Trim size of 170 × 240 mm (6.7 × 9.5 in) with 224 pages including front and back matter. All copies include a ribbon marker, headbands, and tailbands.
  

As with every Conversation Tree Press book, you can expect:
- All colour artwork reproduced in full colour across all editions.
- All artwork included in every state.
- A limited edition that will never be reprinted.
- A slipcase or other enclosure made of thick, sturdy boards with the insides lined in a flocked material for maximum protection, at no additional cost.

Collector’s Edition

Pre-order Now

The Collector’s Edition of Elric of Melniboné is limited to 500 unnumbered copies in a binding designed by Tony Geer. 

It is bound in full cloth printed with an illustration by Greg Rutkowski, with the title, author, and series name foil-stamped in gold on the spine. The endpapers are GF Smith Colorplan.

Click to enlarge

The text is letterpress printed on Munken Pure Rough Cream 120gsm (80lb) paper, and the full-colour paintings are reproduced via offset printing and tipped in by hand.

Each copy is enclosed in a custom slipcase, wrapped in black, two-tone cloth. The interior of the slipcase is lined with Suedel, a soft, flocked material that cushions and protects the book.

All copies are signed by Greg Rutkowski.

US$275 including slipcase. Shipping is expected in Q3 2027.

Pre-order Now

Deluxe Edition

Availability:
1. Wednesday October 14 at 10am ET: Email sent to collectors who have Deluxe rights from our previous edition, Perdido Street Station, with a private link to pre-order a matching copy of Elric of Melniboné numbered #1–200.
2. Wednesday October 21 at 12pm ET: Unclaimed copies from #1–200 and copies #201–250 will be available to the public. Any available copies from #1–200 (i.e. those with publisher’s rights) will be assigned first based on order time when public pre-orders open.

The Deluxe Edition of Elric of Melniboné is limited to 250 individually numbered copies handbound by Ludlow Bookbinders in a binding designed by Tony Geer.

All six volumes of the Deluxe Edition share a single design. Only the volume number and the small emblem in the cartouche beneath it change as the series progresses, with each emblem drawn from the main story in its volume. Each volume can be picked out, while the set comfortably reads as one work on the shelf. The set is meant to evoke the look and feel of books from the personal library of an Emperor of Melniboné, in Imrryr, the Dreaming City.

The bindings are full leather, made of real goatskin, with intricate details stamped on the spine and front board in multiple passes, from designs by Svetlana Molodchenko. The white leather is, of course, an homage to Elric VIII, 428th Emperor of Melniboné, our albino prince.  

The spine features a leather label with the series name and volume number, set between two prominent raised bands. The cartouche on the first volume holds a gemstone stamped in red foil to set it apart from the gilt frame: the Actorios, the stone of the Ring of Kings, handed down through the long line of Melniboné’s emperors to Elric.

The front board carries an expansive blind-embossed decoration enclosing an illustration of Elric’s dragon helm—the helm worn by the Dragon Princes of Melniboné, with a dragon perched upon its crown. 

The Deluxe Edition is printed on a custom making of Hahnemühle’s Ingres 120gsm, a mould-made paper we first fell in love with on our Deluxe Edition of Rip Van Winkle. In that book’s oversize format, the grain direction, an important property when making books, ran perfectly, head to tail.

Most of our books, however—Chronicles of Elric among them—are octavos, unlike Rip Van Winkle’s folio format. With octavos, the printed sheet is folded one more time, and that extra fold turns the grain across the spine. A book with its grain running the wrong way resists opening and won’t lie comfortably flat, so using the paper as it was made was not an option.

Instead, we worked with Hahnemühle to make a custom version: the same paper with the same deckled edges, but with the grain running in the other direction, perfect for Chronicles of Elric and other similar editions (including our upcoming edition of The King of Elfland’s Daughter). 

We’ve kept the deckle on the fore-edge and the foot, while the head has been trimmed and gilded. Gilding the top edge alone is the older, conventional treatment, given that it is the top of the book that gathers dust on the shelf, and the gilt offers protection where it’s needed. 

The artwork is offset-printed separately on different paper and tipped in by hand. 

The endpapers are red Hahnemühle Bugra.

Taken together, the letterpress printing, calligraphy, decorations, binding design, gilt head, and deckled paper give the book the look and feel of the old tomes that we imagine line the libraries of Melniboné.

Each volume is enclosed in a custom slipcase handmade by Ludlow Bookbinders. The sides are covered in a black, two-tone cloth while the top and bottom are capped in the same leather used in the book’s binding. The interior of the slipcase is lined with Suedel, a soft, flocked material that cushions and protects the book.

All copies are signed by Michael Moorcock and Greg Rutkowski, and individually hand-numbered #1–250.

US$785 including slipcase. Shipping is expected in Q3 2027.

Lettered Edition

Availability:
1. Wednesday October 14 at 10am ET: Email sent to collectors who have Lettered rights from our previous edition, Perdido Street Station, with a private link to pre-order a matching copy of Elric of Melniboné.
2. Wednesday October 21 at 12pm ET: Unclaimed copies will be made available for pre-order via a lottery.

The Lettered Edition is limited to 26 copies, individually lettered A to Z. Each copy is handbound by Ludlow Bookbinders in a binding designed by Tony Geer.

The binding design embodies the struggle between Law and Chaos that runs through the whole of Elric’s story—a balance forever sought and never held. Law is vellum, covering the upper half of the book; Chaos is leather, hand-dyed for the edition by Gillian Stewart of Juju Books, covering the lower.

The struggle of the Eternal Champion—of whom Elric is one incarnation among many—is waged in past, present, and future alike, and the structure follows it: a three-piece Bradel binding, with the back board, spine, and front board each built separately, one for each. The spine, standing for the present, carries an inset black roundel with the volume’s number in gilt—a dark mark at the meeting of Law and Chaos, where Elric and his black sword are always to be found.

The vellum is procured from William Cowley, a storied fourth-generation family enterprise in England established in 1870, renowned for crafting vellum by hand using age-old expertise and methods. Each sheet is painstakingly prepared through a labour‑intensive process (see video) that has changed little in centuries, resulting in a material whose durability and beauty have made it a mainstay of fine bookmaking for hundreds of years. Because vellum pulls hard on the boards, they are extra thick and bevelled on the edges for a more refined look.

The leather is the work of Gillian Stewart of Juju Books. It begins as natural, vegetable-tanned goatskin from Harmatan. Gillian lays down the craquelle first, the fine fractured lines that run through the leather, and then hand-paints the dye over them, so the colour sits in layers and the lines show through from beneath. Each volume will have a different colour, and the craquelle will grow more pronounced from book to book, as Chaos gains in strength across the course of the series.

The paper for the Lettered Edition is a 110gsm handmade paper of 100% cotton, with wonderfully uneven deckled edges that add a great deal of character to the book. The top edge has been trimmed and gilded. 

The artwork is printed separately on archival paper using a Canon printer with eleven different inks, a process commonly referred to as giclée printing, and tipped in by hand. 

The endpapers are Hahnemühle Bugra, and the headbands and tailbands are hand-sewn in two colours to match the vellum and leather. 

As with the Deluxe Edition, we think the letterpress printing, calligraphy, decorations, use of vellum, gilt head, and deckled paper would make this a worthy addition to Elric’s personal library. 

The Solander box is handmade by Ludlow Bookbinders and features a rounded spine covered in goatskin, the same leather used on the Deluxe Edition binding, with a spine treatment similar to that of the Deluxe book. The dragon helm is stamped in gold on the front, and the inside is lined in Suedel for extra protection. 

All copies are signed by Michael Moorcock and Greg Rutkowski.

US$2,695 including the Solander box. Shipping is expected in Q3 2027.

Production Status

Production status is a new section we’re introducing as we announce the full edition details and begin accepting pre-orders. It allows collectors to see exactly how far along we are in the production process.

Artwork: complete
Prototypes and binding design: complete
Typesetting: in progress
Proofreading: next up

Greg Rutkowski’s Artwork

Greg is known for his brooding skies and magnificent dragons—a signature style honed over more than fifteen years creating work for Wizards of the Coast, Sony, and Ubisoft, including dozens of Magic: The Gathering cards and Dungeons & Dragons covers.

That signature is on full display here: Elric stands with Stormbringer before the Dreaming City as the dragons of Melniboné wheel overhead. This piece is used on the cover of the Collector’s Edition and is included as a foldout in the Deluxe and Lettered Editions. 

He has also contributed seven other marvellous illustrations (warning: nudity on slide 6):

Interior Design and Typography

Emily Benton, who did a splendid job on Perdido Street Station, is designing the interiors for all six volumes of Chronicles of Elric. It’s a monumental task—not only because there are six volumes, but also because of the nature of the collection itself. Across those volumes sit nineteen pieces of text, broadly grouped into short fiction (short stories, novelettes, and brief interludes) and novels (sometimes divided into parts), often with inconsistent structures and typographic hierarchies.

The challenge wasn’t simply to create a look and feel for Elric’s world. It was to build a system that wouldn’t break under the weight of all those requirements, while giving the reader an intuitive sense of where they are at every turn. An enormous amount of work went into it, and with Emily’s permission, we’d like to share some of that with you.

Emily began with an audit—working through each of the six volumes in detail and documenting what she found—before going on to give each kind of text its own treatment.

For the novels, the hierarchy looked like this:

And the first draft of the unique treatments:

And for short stories:

And the first draft of their styling:

And here are two comparisons:

Emily is working on all six books as one big project, and with the artwork for the series all either complete or in progress, we anticipate having all the preproduction wrapped up in the not-too-distant future. 

Text Face: Lapture

Just Another Foundry’s Lapture is the workhorse typeface that ties the edition together. It proved the ideal companion for the text: its design draws on both blackletter and roman traditions, and it sits in natural harmony with Svetlana’s title calligraphy.

Page Layout

Emily started with the Van de Graaf canon (see our Typesetting Treasure Island blog post for more information) and doesn't stray too far from it, slightly reducing the top and bottom margins. The still generous bottom and outer margins retain a medieval feel. 

Title Calligraphy

Svetlana Molodchenko created the custom calligraphy for all six titles, along with the title page decorations.

Letterpress Printing by Nomad Letterpress

We’ll be collaborating once again with Pat Randle and Ellen Bills at Nomad Letterpress in Gloucestershire, England, who will be letterpress printing Elric of Melniboné. They have a long history of printing Matrix magazine, a book arts periodical, for Whittington Press; a number of Conversation Tree Press books, including Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility; and their own editions.

Hand Binding by Ludlow Bookbinders in England

Ludlow Bookbinders, located in Shropshire, England, have been keeping the craft of English bookbinding alive for generations. They’ve handbound a number of Conversation Tree Press editions, and we’re looking forward to collaborating with them on Elric of Melniboné.

Michael Moorcock

Michael Moorcock is one of the most important and influential figures in speculative fiction and fantasy literature. Listed by The Times (London) as among the fifty greatest British writers since 1945, he is the author of 100 books and more than 150 shorter stories in practically every genre. He has been the recipient of several lifetime achievement awards, including the Prix Utopiales, the SFWA Grand Master, the Stoker, and the World Fantasy, and has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. He has been awarded the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the John W. Campbell Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Whitbread Award.