OtherEric

Several of Cain's books appeared in Avon's Murder Mystery Monthly series, which is something of an overlap between pulp digests and paperbacks. The MMM edition of "Double Indemnity" was the first standalone complete edition of the story, it has previously been reprinted in an omnibus with two other stories by Cain.

No, I won't, because I've never actually heard that. However, your comment caused a file mismatch as I pulled this up as the closest match I could find in my brain:

Skippy, not Snippy. And how the heck do I, a Yank, who has never seen the show, and wasn't even alive when it originally aired, know that off the top of my head?

I hadn't, but it's been a minute since I ran into a listing I wanted to save... For me, it's mostly Peter Wheat related books I can't afford, and they don't turn up very often. My only workaround is to suggest "print screen" to get a screenshot can be your friend. Opening the image in a new tab can help. Yay for higher resolution monitors these days, so you can actually get something semi-useful like that, and my apologies if I'm just telling you tricks you already know.

Today's book. This one is a reprint, but it's the only reprint within the Ace D-series I'm aware of where they changed the cover art. I'm assuming its somehow connected to the fact that this is Ace D-339, and Ace D-340 (Solar Lottery), another reprint, has the other half of the D-103 double the image was taken from. I've got a copy of the D-340 on the way as well, so I'll post that when it shows up. I'm including the original cover of the book and the original use of the cover art for comparison:

I had a friend who had over a century of National Geographics complete, I want to say back to 1909 with no gaps, and quite a few earlier issues. They've become slightly harder to find the past decade or so, I think. From roughly 1950-2000, people believed that any house built in the US would collapse if there weren't a minimum of 10 years of National Geographic back issues in the basement, but they apparently finally figured out how to get around that problem.

Saturday Evening Post with the first publication of Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth”. This one is important at the first time a SF writer from the pulps sold a SF story to the slicks.

My only issue of Collier's. First publication of "There Will Come Soft Rains", my favourite Ray Bradbury story.

Fair enough, although I think Gibson was much better at mixing things up on the Shadow than Dent on Doc Savage or many of the other hero pulp writers

85 in 12 years is nothing compared to Walter Gibson. 20 Shadow novels a year for a decade

Lovecraft wasn't the ghost writer on that story, only on "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs". But I can't remember who was the ghost on that one off the top of my head.

Creepy #42 thoughts: Cover: Trying to think how to describe my reaction... It looks like it should look better than it actually does? All the elements are there, but they're fighting each other and the net reaction is somewhat muted. Loathsome Lore: A pretty solid piece, with nice art by Kelly. Captain Kidd is a good source for a lore page, the reality and the stories have become so jumbled, even during his lifetime and shortly after, that "lore" is about as good a word for it as you can get. Letters: The letter from Frank Miller (assuming it is THE Frank Miller) is definitely noteworthy. But, having noted it, there's really nothing else to say there. The Quaking Horror: Auraleon is a MAJOR Warren creator, searching his name in the index comes back with over 100 matches... some of which are reprints or comments, but still, a ton of stories by him, and he'll be here all the way to the last issues of Creepy and Vampirella. The story is pretty good, with Fox going all-out Lovecraft and Auraleon providing nicely bizarre imagery to go with it. A Change of Identity: Glut knows he's doing a six-page story and keeps the amount of story well calibrated to the room available, but it does mean it's a rather slight story. Then Cockrum's art is a bit too clean, for lack of a better word, than is really needed... but, well, that's Cockrum's style and always was. All of which makes this story a bit of a reversal of a more common result... I like the story more than I think the actual quality warrants, because I love Cockrum's art so much in general. The Amazing Money-Making Wallet: Joe Staton only does two stories for Warren, but has over 3000 credits at the GCD. I'm not even sure where to begin trying to summarize his career, so let's go with co-creator (with Nick Cuti) of E-Man and co-creator of the Huntress for DC. The story is fairly amusing, although similar to Cockrum I think his work is a bit too clean to fit the story perfectly. Spacial Delivery: An amusing story with Todd providing his unusual but effective artwork. A nice humor-horror balance. A Chronicle: GCD says Jorge B. Galvez is a pseudonym for Jorge Badia Romero, I'm not familiar with their work under either name, but they do a handful of stories for Warren. He illustrates a very odd but extrmely effective little story by Steve Skeates. Escape from Nowhere World: We didn't really need a follow-up to "On the Wings of a Bird", honestly. But they could have done worse than this, with a solid ending and some of the best and most enjoyable art I've seen from Grandenetti yet. Ice Wolf: Gary Kaufman's last story, and probably his best work yet. But I'm not a fan of the cannibalism theme, so while I can recognize the craft here I can't say I like it at all. This was really a pretty good issue; overall, even if I did wind up damning lots of it with faint praise.

What I have is the 2nd print, actually. Would like to get a 1st, I think it looks better.

It's on the "keep an eye out for this" list, to be sure.

Grand Comics Database says the script is by Bissette, based on an interview with him in Comic Book Creator #28

You rock the look, Randall, but not a lot of people can pull it off.

In today. This gives me the complete run of Slow Death, 1-11 and Zero. It's really one of my favorite undergrounds titles, very much drawing on the EC tradition:

Be fair. Their intent was to sell to absolutely anybody who could get their money onto the counter... which they probably suspected contained a lot of men in raincoats with their collars raised, but they didn't discriminate.

Nice one! In my experience that's the hardest of the Merritt Murder Mystery Monthly issues to find by a fair margin, and it's a beautiful copy.

The first Burroughs pulp I ever owned (and one of the first 10 or so pulps, period) was an Amazing Stories Quarterly with a John Carter story. I love those rebound giants whenever I see them, which isn't often. This isn't that one, it's a different ASQ I have with a Burroughs story.

See, I don't see that as saying the publisher had any of that intent. But some of the creators did, and even without that the books did have the effect described to some degree. So it's a fair statement, if poorly worded in suggesting that the books somehow had intent on their own.

That issue has been pulling a legitmate premium as a classic cover and story for quite a while now, $10 was a good deal when I grabbed it several years ago. 95% of Astounding/ Analog from about 1945 up is very much of the "grab long runs cheap" category, as you suggest. But some issues can be a pain, because they've inevitably been cherry picked by the first person to see the lot.

This looks like a magic trick I had as a kid, the basic idea is it has what looks like a moving blade that you can pull out the top, you put something in the larger hole, and you push it down. The blade appears in the lower hole but has passed through whatever was in the bigger hole. I say "blade", it was a piece of semi-tough plastic. It might cut a soft french fry in the lower hole on a good day; it couldn't break skin.