Little Black Book

Little black books (LBB) refer to the original printings of GDW's Classic Traveller books, including the core books, adventures, and supplements.

• These digest-sized books had black covers with minimal text and added color.
• Please also see Big Floppy Book and Little White Book.

Description

US Format Versus UK Format: When Traveller first became available in the United Kingdom, some of the books were printed under license by Games Workshop (the same company that now produces the Warhammer 40,000 range).

• The UK prints were slightly wider and shorter than the US printings, being based on the international A5 page format.
• The US printings were (are) based on the half Quarto paper size, hence the differences in height (from top to bottom) and width (left to right) of these books.

LBB Cover Rendering Machine

The design of these covers can be reproduced using the LBB Cover Rendering machine.

Background

Redundancy of the UK Format: Not all Traveller books were available in the UK printing format.

• Initially, Books 1, 2 and 3 were only available in the UK print format.
• Some of the first Supplements and Adventures were also made available in the UK print format.
• With the rise in popularity of Traveller in the UK and the publication by GDW of more Supplements and Adventures, more US format books were imported into the UK.
• Eventually the UK print format was dropped. The reason(s) for Games Workshop ceasing printing LBBs under its license with GDW in the UK is not known.

Sources

This list of sources was used by the Traveller Wiki Editorial Team and individual contributors to compose this article. Copyrighted material is used under license from Far Future Enterprises or by permission of the author. The page history lists all of the contributions.

• Author & Contributor: BeRKA AKA P-O Bergstedt
• Author & Contributor: Lord (Marquis) and Master of Sophontology Maksim-Smelchak of the Ministry of Science