David Ahl answered:
Interesting that you should ask about the two different covers on the Best of Creative Computing, Vol. 1. Most people don't or didn't see both, so the subject doesn't often come up. First of all, I didn't do it for the reason that magazine publishers do today, i.e., to get you to buy two copies either deliberately or by mistake. TV Guide, in fact, prints four different covers of each issue and encourages people to "collect a complete set!" Yeah, sure.
In any event, the original Best of CC had Mr. Spock on the cover. However, a few years later when we needed more books, Paramount was getting nasty about the use of Star Trek characters without a proper license. Initially we were under their radar screen, but we would have had to pay them mucho $$$ for the larger press run of the reprint book, so we needed another cover. The cover illustration I used had been used on an issue of the magazine (can't remember which issue) but the printer had mixed up two of the color negatives (cyan and magenta), so it looked a bit strange. Needless to say, the artist was rather unhappy with the outcome as was I, so I decided to use the same illustration, this time with the correct colors, on the cover of the book.
- See first edition cover
- See second edition cover
- See first edition back cover
- See second edition back cover
