The First Law Kickstarter is LIVE

Delighted to say the Kickstarter for special hardcovers of The First Law trilogy should now be up and running, and we can reveal these books in all their glory. Each has a brand new wraparound dustjacket painted using actual human hands by Joel Daniel Phillips that look a little something like this:

With custom gilded boards* beneath specific to each book that look like this:

With lettering on the spines only like this:

So they end up looking something like this, without and with dust jacket respectively:

There will also be sumptuously illustrated endpapers at both ends of each book, but we’ll be revealing those in due course. As is traditional on Kickstarter there’ll be several tiers you can select, ranging from single copies of an individual book through sets with various additional First Law merch to limited numbers of straight signed and signed plus dedicated sets. Said signing and dedicating will be done on special colour full page book plates specific to each book such as this:

Apologies to those who prefer the pen applied to the actual paper of the book, but what with the numbers involved, the dedication as well as the signature, and the presence of the Atlantic Ocean between me and the place where these books will be distributed, the logistics of shipping me the signature sheets, or shipping me to the finished books, become excessively difficult and expensive.

I’ve been working with Joel and the other folks at Lit Escalates for some time on the internal art and merch for the Devils. They came to me a while back asking if I’d like to do a limited run of signed and dedicated hardcovers of the First Law – which is when we realised there’d never been a general release hardcover in the US. There’d been some undersize book club editions in the far past, and the long sold out limiteds from Subterranean Press, but otherwise nothing. With some help from Orbit US we set out to right that deep injustice, and the scale and ambition grew along the way to what you see before you.

It’s always great to see what a new artist comes up with in response to your work – Joel’s a portrait painter rather than a book cover specialist, and with these having no need to sell off the shelf or feature any lettering on the front covers, he’s had a really free hand in how he went about the design and choice of subject. I feel the result is something with a very strong identity and a sense of humour you don’t often see on a fantasy book.

There’s been some great art in, and on, Curious King’s sumptuous ongoing editions of the First Law, but those are high end, letterpress, very limited editions. These Lit Escalates editions use the standard hardcover setting – there are going to be 2000 sets signed and dedicated and a further 4000 sets signed only, but beyond that they’re not limited (or only by the logistics of actually printing and shipping them) – so they should be a good deal more affordable and obtainable. It’s great to have something interesting and beautiful that sits between the standard edition and the limited market, for fans who aren’t necessarily intense collectors but would just like a nice set of hardcovers on their shelf.

There’s much more detailed information on the Kickstarter site itself about specs and terms, including some interviews with me and Joel about the project. Happy to try and answer some of your questions here, but if it’s related to specs, shipping, pricing, timescales you may have more luck with Lit Escalates, who are handling that side of it.

We need to clear 2000 copies of each book to make the numbers add, but after that, the sky’s the limit. Let’s see where we get to…

UPDATE: We were funded within 23 minutes so it looks like this is definitely happening. Thanks to everyone who’s already pitched in…

Posted in announcements, artwork, merchandise, news by Joe Abercrombie on November 21st, 2025.