Roger Zelazny’s Roadmarks just got the deluxe treatment from Centipede Press, and it didn’t last a day on the shelf. The Colorado small press released its signed and numbered edition of the 1979 road-trip science fiction novel on June 2026, limited to 400 copies at $100 each, and the entire run sold out within 24 hours of going live.
The book was on their own PayPal link with several copies also being offered through Subterranean Press’s webstore. This is an incredible speed for a lesser-known work, not known as one of Zelazny’s finest.
The edition wraps Zelazny’s genre-bending novel, which follows a driver named Red Dorakeen down a road that connects every point in history to every point that never happened, in a full cloth binding with a dust jacket, ribbon marker, and head and tail bands. Cover art comes from Pascal Blanché, with an introduction and glossary from Christopher S. Kovacs, plus an author interview and reproductions of older paperback covers. Both Kovacs and Blanché signed the run.
Centipede Press has spent 25 years building a reputation most collectors in the small press world know by name. Founded in 2001 by Jerad Walters out of Lakewood, Colorado, the publisher puts out roughly two dozen titles a year in print runs typically capped between 200 and 1,000 copies, with heavy cloth and leather bindings, archival paper, and cover art commissioned specifically for each release. That combination of scarcity and production value has turned Centipede into one of the driving forces behind the current boom in high-end genre reprints, where fans pay well past mass-market prices for editions built to be kept rather than read once and shelved.
The Roadmarks sellout is already rippling through the collector community. Members of the Centipede Press collectors group on Facebook started asking where to find copies within hours of the listing disappearing, the same pattern that hits nearly every Centipede release once word spreads. Centipede’s own site currently shows the signed and numbered copies gone, with a note that more stock is expected later in the week.
Centipede frequently follows a sold-out signed edition with a later unnumbered printing at a lower price point, aimed at readers who want the art and production quality without chasing a numbered copy on the secondary market. Fans in the collectors group are already hoping Roadmarks gets the same treatment, since a second run would be the only realistic way to land a copy without paying a resale markup once the current print run starts showing up on eBay.
Zelazny won six Hugo Awards and three Nebulas over his career, and Roadmarks has held a smaller but dedicated following among his readers since its original 1979 release.
With small press reprints selling out this fast across the board, is the current wave of deluxe genre fiction editions a passive collector boom, or has scarcity itself become the product?
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