Very nice.
Is that frontispiece handcolored by Frazetta?
I wish! But it does have a somewhat interesting backstory. This was the second of the Wandering Star REH limited editons to be released. All of them were intended to be signed by the respective artists. But when this was released in the late 90's it was after one of Frazetta's strokes and he was unable to sign. So the books was published anyway as a numbered, but unsigned edition of 1050 copies. A few years later, however, after he trained himself to write with his left hand, he signed and hand numbered 125 copies that they had in stock at the museum. They were only available through at the museum or through the museum website.
When I started to put together the Wandering Star set a couple of years ago I knew I had to get one of these signed copies of Ultimate Triumph. I finally got the money to get one, but unfortunately it was right after Ellie died and the website was shut down. When it opened up late that year, the book was listed as sold out. Desperate I called the number listed on the webpage to see if they had any copies stashed away, but I got some golf shop instead of the museum and hung up thinking I had the wrong number. Now I realize it was his son's golf shop. That was two days before the bulldozer incident.
After the bulldozer, I gave up and resigned myself to settling for one of the regular unsigned copies. I set an ebay alert so I could just grab the next one that came up for sell. A few weeks later I got an alert and when I clicked I saw that a bookdealer had listed one of the signed copies with a BIN priced well-below what Frazetta's had been originally charging. I've never hit a BIN so fast in my life!
It looked a bookdealer that dealt with regular fiction and while he realized it was signed didn't know that it was different from the regular unsigned limited edition. He probably just looked on ABE to see what others were selling it for. He had it priced at the extreme high end of FMV for a regular copy so he probably thought I was a sucker.