The Turner Diaries - First and Second Editions

First and Second Editions

The Turner Diaries was first serialized in the mid 1970s in the National Alliance's tabloid paper, Attack!. The first printing in paperback was May 1978. Pierce originally set his story in the 1980s. Its reprinting (September 1980) took the form of a slightly altered second edition that moved the setting forward ten years. Although subsequent printings of The Turner Diaries have featured different cover art or back cover copy, they have kept to the second edition's text.

In keeping with the new 1990s time frame, events in the past are generally aged by ten years, though not always. Some examples:

• Turner's diatribe about the "long string of Marxist acts of terror 10 to 15 years ago" is changed to "20 years ago."
• Turner's lament at the success of the System's brainwashing "these past 50 years or so" remains unchanged.
• The Order's "nearly 58 years of existence" is increased to 68, making the date of its founding 1925, a reference to the SS.
• Turner's astonishment at "how many dark, kinky-haired Middle Easterners have invaded this country in the last decade" is not changed.
• The epilogue's exultation that in 1989, "exactly a century after the birth of The Great One... the dream of a White world finally became a certainty", becomes "just 110 years" after Adolf Hitler's birth.

Also to make the book fit its later date, prices are usually doubled, and sums of money are also often doubled, but not consistently.

The second edition retains one major artifact of the original setting: in the first edition, dates fall on the same day of the week as their real-world 1980s dates. The later edition does not change days of the week, putting them out of sync with their 1990s dates. Another minor change is that a short passage, where Turner's lover spots his Order pendant, is moved a few pages earlier to the end of Chapter X. The first edition also featured illustrations by Dennis Nix. Later printings dropped the illustrations, used a smaller typeface, and switched from bold to italics for emphasis.