Joe Abercrombie Has Come Full Circle With Folio Society’s ‘Game Of Thrones’ Illustrated Edition

Folio Society’s ‘Game of Thrones’ illustrated edition

Courtesy of Folio Society

Joe Abercrombie can remember “the best kind of profound shock” he experienced when first reading George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones.

The “challenging, multi-dimensional characters and their inner lives, a far more visceral approach to sex and violence, a more ‘realistic’ feeling moral and political universe, and some truly shocking twists and ruthless surprises” made him fall in love with fantasy all over again.

Moreover, the first entry in the iconic Westeros saga revolutionized the genre.

“There was the depth and realism of the characters, combined with the third-person limited approach to the writing, where everything is written from deep in the point of view of a given character, suffused with their hopes, fears, memories, voice,” added Abercrombie. “The narrator becomes almost absent—the story is told by the characters. That kind of approach to fantasy, especially with such a varied, authentic and diverse cast, seemed entirely new to me. Then there was the darkness, the moral ambiguity, the grit. These things had obviously been in fantasy before but tended to occupy the pulpier or more literary ends of the market. George unapologetically brought them full into epic fantasy, in the big Tolkien tradition.”

As he likes to put it, Martin did for fantasy what “James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet did with the thriller or Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove did with the western.”

“It was the combination of a tried and tested, well-loved genre with a more modern, more gritty, more morally complex sensibility,” Abercrombie explained. “Let’s not forget about execution, either, which is always the key to bringing any set of ideas to life. George is just a great writer, with vivid and arresting world building, simultaneously outsize but relatable, with densely woven plotting that’s on a huge scale but never loses the personal, and above all with brilliant, dangerous, witty, hideous, constantly surprising characters.”

Now, all these years later, the Locus Award-winning author behind the First Law and Age of Madness trilogies has come full circle by penning an introduction to Folio Society’s 30th anniversary illustrated edition of the OG book that launched a cultural phenomenon.

“I was delighted, obviously, partly because this is such an important book within the fantasy canon, but also because it had been such an important book for me as a reader and a writer,” Abercrombie said of the opportunity. “In writing an introduction, I guess I wanted to [highlight] some of the things A Game of Thrones made popular— especially in its TV incarnation—have become almost de rigueur. I wanted to try and get across how shocking, bold, transgressive, and transformative they were at the time; and how they influenced me and a whole generation of other writers to push fantasy in a more dangerous direction.”

He continued: “It demonstrated beyond doubt that you could do something that was absolutely core epic fantasy—with all the scale, grandeur, magic and adventure that people come to the genre for—but that was also character focused, gritty, challenging, funny, shocking—all the things that I felt had been largely missing when I stopped reading fantasy in my teens,” Abercrombie concluded. “I’d made some effort at writing when I left university—the same characters and situations that would later be in The Blade Itself, but it had been pompous, ponderous, twee. Reading A Game of Thrones and its sequels encouraged me to pick it back up but with a much grittier, more honest, more adult sensibility.”

Limited to a mere 1,000 copies, all of which are hand-signed by Martin himself, Folio’s 872-page volume retails for $2,200 a pop.

Such a hefty price tag nets the buyer more than just a simple book. Clamshell housing, dragon-skin leather binding, original illustrations by award winning-artist Joe Burton Joe, and a rolled linen map of the “known world” (i.e. Westeros, Essos, and Sothoryos) are just a few of the deluxe features in this version.

To quote Folio Society Editor James Rose: “This volume is so stunning it could have been taken directly from the Citadel library itself.”

“We have been incredibly fortunate to work with the finest British craftspeople on this special 30th anniversary version: from the leather makers who created our incredible dragon skin leather, to the James Cropper paper mill who made our bespoke endpapers, to Ludlow Bookbinders who are binding each volume with care,” he said. “With a limitation page blocked in real gold, a rolled map and a stunning box—and each copy personally signed by George R. R. Martin himself—this is truly a limited edition worthy of the Iron Throne that absolutely every fan of the series needs in their library.”

We may be in the dead of summer right now, but winter is coming…