Fantaciencia

In an earlier post, I mentioned in passing Fantaciencia, a collectable encyclopedia which was first published since April, 1982 by Exclusivas Gráficas Catalanas (EGC) from Barcelona, Spain, and made its way to Peru through Distribuidora de Revistas Rímac, S.A., being sold at newsstands and supermarkets. Its complete title was Fantaciencia, Enciclopedia de la Fantasía, Ciencia y Futuro ("Fantascience, Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Science and Future"), and each weekly issue consisted of 16 pages plus a collectable 4-page spread at the center which was meant to be detached and kept separately. The first two issues came together with a folder meant to keep those spreads:

They also came with a 4-page insert which described the scope of the collectable encyclopedia:

And on the inner back cover of each issue, there was some additional information:

They also came with a large poster (slightly larger than A3 size, at 44cm by 60cm):

A second large poster of the same size was included with issue 3:

And a third one, with issue 6:

As stated in the original insert, the collection was supposed to be comprised of 70 issues, to be bound in 9 volumes (7 volumes of 10 issues each, plus two more containing the center spreads which came at the center of each issue), but unfortunately, it was canceled after reaching issue 40, making a total of 5 volumes (the first 4 comprised of 10 16-page issues each, plus the 5th being comprised of the 40 4-page spreads, so that each volume was 160 pages long).

By contrast. the original publication from which it was translated was an Italian 80-issue collection titled Grande Enciclopedia della Fantascienza ("Great Encyclopedia of Science Fiction"), published weekly by Editoriale del Drago between the end of March, 1980 and the end of December, 1981. Each issue had 24 pages, plus a 4-page spread at its center, They didn't include just the articles that were translated for the Spanish version, but also several short stories (and some longer ones) for different science-fiction authors, which were sadly omitted in the Spanish translation, most likely due to lacking the rights to publish a translated version in Spanish of those stories (the exception being Harry Harrison's Planet Story, and some old articles bu H.G. Wells).

The first 64 issues were bound into 8 volumes of 8 issues each (thus making a total of 192 pages per volume), each one covering a group of related subjects, while volumes 9 and 10 (titled "S.F. Profiles") were comprised of the central spreads of all 80 issues, with 40 each (thus having 160 pages per volume). Volume 11 was an extra-sized volume compiling the remaining 16 issues into a single Encyclopedic Dictionary.

Even though it was unfinished and didn't include the whole contents of the original Grande Enciclopedia della Fantascienza, Fantaciencia, Enciclopedia de la Fantasía, Ciencia y Futuro still made  a great reference for the works of science-fiction published up to early 1982, so, it covered Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back (but not Return of the Jedi yet), among other things like Star Trek (both the original series and The Motion Picture), Planet of the Apes, Alien, Zardoz, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Battlestar Galactica. I was one of the lucky few to manage to get all the issues as they were originally published; later it became much sought after, but since it wasn't being sold at newsstands anymore, those who wanted to get it (among whom were several friends of mine still part of Gen X, but some 5-8 years younger than me) had to go hunt for them at bookstores which carried out-of-print and/or used books and magazines, and I don't think they managed to get the complete 40 issues. Thanks to owning it (and, of course, reading it) I became familiar not just with several different subjects, but also with the art of several illustrators and various literary works which I managed to get ahold of in later years.