Surfing Alien

All hail "Saucy Movie Tales"

Those are magnificent.

Jaw dropping

4 hours ago, moonpool said:

Bought the 5 and 7 as a pair many years ago.

Beautiful. I need to get one. Another "Imagine what it would be worth if that cover was on a comic"

12 minutes ago, moonpool said:

I'll put in one of my favorite Ace covers.  D-5

That's "Evil" of the kind Howlin' Wolf would sing! Nice copy. I don't think i've seen one in person.

Switching gears somewhat... still Ace but not sci-fi. Lester was not only about Doc Savage... Uncommon in square and tight condition

Oops, I did it again... Just in. I could see this becoming a bad habit if I keep finding them at the right condition/price ratio

Anderson Redhead Space Babe riding Jar Jar Binks.

If she's the beautiful and fey Berild, she's about to be blasted into eternal dust.

7 hours ago, Pat Calhoun said:

Good on you, Surf, for reading 'Enchantress'. It's the best of the 3 original 'Eric John Stark' stories and is another of Leigh's masterpieces.

It's pretty cool so far. I like this era of Planet Stories with the Anderson full length space babe covers. These are some of the best. I just got the first one in the mailbox, i'll post it in the pulp thread. The Black Amazon cover is iconic, i'm going to try to find a nice copy for a keeper on that one.

5 hours ago, OtherEric said:

Loving all these D-series Ace doubles.  There's just something special about them, isn't there?

One of my better copies, although still not perfect:

I've have that one too and yours is better than mine. I think Leiber gets read... and well read

8 hours ago, Pat Calhoun said:

Just wanted to second Hap's sage words on 'Rhiannon'; it's a classic.

I started reading "The Enchantress of Venus" in the Planet Stories pulp I recently picked up. Although it's a stretch on the science (actually, it doesn't really address the science of breathing and surviving on Venus, the characters just do it) it's a brisk adventure read so far, very pulpy. and fun.

2 hours ago, frozentundraguy said:

Those are some sweet copies. I just ran a check on some of the  books I still need, and am finding prices are up in the last year or so, even for books not by PKD. I will have to check but I believe I only have one Ace sci-fi double that appears to be unread. (Posted a while back, but its is D-193 The Man Who Japed) While prices are up these books are quite affordable compared to vintage comic books of the same age.

 

Prices are definitely up, I suspect they will be for very high grade books as they dissapear into collections. I have a few more that i'm pretty sure are unread but i'll have to do some box diving that I haven't done in a while to show them to ya my friends...

22 hours ago, OtherEric said:

That's why I called them "tricky" rather than rare.

If you think the mysteries are rare, try finding the westerns!  I don't have any yet, would like to get at least a couple as examples.

I absolutely agree with you that finding the books in high grade is almost impossible.  I only have 1 or 2 D-series I could describe like that.

I'm not positive, but I might call two of the SF doubles rare, personally.  The D-13 took me forever to find a copy, I suspect that's a combo of being a very early book and it not getting flagged as half of it counting as SF until well after the fact.  And I think I've only ever seen the Conan one out in the wild once.  Probably at least partly being early, and a combo of a) some SF readers rejecting it as fantasy, not SF, so a slightly lower survival rate; and b) Conan & Fantasy fans means more copies are locked down hard in collections.

I have a couple of the early mysteries... they're very tough in any kind of grade...This is my worst one.. it's real clean but has the crease and the spine is twisted but it is still beaustiful IMO

Here's my Cosmic Puppets. Both of these PKD books are survivors from my original collection that I sold in the 90's. I sold 95% of what I had, about 7 long comic boxes of very high grade books that I had amassed over 15 years of searching. But there were a bunch I kept for various reasons, mostly authors and/or covers I loved in exceptional condition. Glad I kept these.

That's very cool. I know there are a few Avon pulps with comics, Out of This World Adventures for one. Are there many others?

On 1/25/2018 at 11:50 PM, Surfing Alien said:

Switching gears... "He undermined their world with mockery!" Classic Ace SciFi

I had a couple dozen Aces that looked like this in my original collection, only have a few now but this isn't a bad one to have

18 hours ago, OtherEric said:

That's why I called them "tricky" rather than rare.

If you think the mysteries are rare, try finding the westerns!  I don't have any yet, would like to get at least a couple as examples.

I absolutely agree with you that finding the books in high grade is almost impossible.  I only have 1 or 2 D-series I could describe like that.

I'm not positive, but I might call two of the SF doubles rare, personally.  The D-13 took me forever to find a copy, I suspect that's a combo of being a very early book and it not getting flagged as half of it counting as SF until well after the fact.  And I think I've only ever seen the Conan one out in the wild once.  Probably at least partly being early, and a combo of a) some SF readers rejecting it as fantasy, not SF, so a slightly lower survival rate; and b) Conan & Fantasy fans means more copies are locked down hard in collections.

Yeah, I recently posted the nice D-13 I found after a long search, it's not perfect on both sides but as close as I'm gonna get. The Conan is always beat up. I used to have a real nice one in my first collection

I posted my Man Who Japes on here a ways back, i'll see if I can find it, it's really sharp.

9 hours ago, OtherEric said:

Just for curiosity, what are considered the tricky SF doubles?  I think I listed most of them earlier, but are any others considered particularly hard to get?  I had the PKD books for a while, since I've been a fan for a long time.  I do need to upgrade my The Man Who Japed, though:

To get back on your question... I don't think any of the Sci-Fi Doubles are "hard"

Sci-Fi collectors go way back and things this recent were always hallowed and well kept by aficionados

They might get "expensive" because certain authors, especially PKD and Harlan Ellison, are so loved that there is always lots of demand but I can't think of any Ace Sci Fi Doubles that can't be found if someone is willing to pony up the cash. The mysterys seem scarcer generally.

Now, "condition", that adds to the equation and if you're looking for copies with no reading crease and sharp corners, that gets much more complicated as all vintage thick PB's got reader creases as soon as the covers got opened. Unread looking Ace's are amazing and not so common.

5 hours ago, OtherEric said:

Just for curiosity, what are considered the tricky SF doubles?  I think I listed most of them earlier, but are any others considered particularly hard to get?  I had the PKD books for a while, since I've been a fan for a long time.  I do need to upgrade my The Man Who Japed, though:

I've been bingeing on "The Man in the High Castle" on Amazon this week and it's almost like they pulled the cinematography atmosphere right off the cover of "The World Jones Made"

5 hours ago, 50YrsCollctngCmcs said:

St. Marks was a great store to in a great neighborhood. McSorley's for beer one block away and the Ukrainian National Home for great food on 2'nd Ave.

Of course my favorite Manhattan comic shop visit was to Supersnipe uptown in the early seventies. My grandmother took me up there. I had little money but bought a copy of Donald Duck #30 that I still own. Don't have a scan of it handy or would post it.

Supersnipe was great, I remember one day buying stacks of mint overstock Avengers Annual 10 & X-Men 150 there back in the day.

Other great Manhattan spots were Village Comics on Bleeker Street, Manhattan Comics under the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd and a bit later in the 90's, Jeff's Comics and Cards on Sullivan Street (Where I met Howard Rogofsky)

6 hours ago, Robot Man said:

I always made a visit to a small shop in the village called I think, Second Childhood. Full of beautiful vintage toys and some times old comic books when I was in NY. Probably long gone now but man it was cool.

I remember it on the path of my Manhattan pilgrimages. I was never a big toy guy but I dabbled in them. Sadly it is gone as of 2008. I found a very nice tribute to the store and its owner, Grover Van Dexter online here:

https://gvshp.org/blog/2016/08/24/village-people-grover-van-dexter/

5 hours ago, Randall Dowling said:

Hey!  Me too!  As a kid living on Long Island, it was an awesome treat to go into the city and stop by the Batcave.  If memory serves, the front door was a half flight below the sidewalk.  I remember being super excited going down those stairs... 

The Batcave, Forbidden Planet, St. Marks, & Roger's Comic Shop (before he morphed to The Mysterious Time Machine) in the Village, Big Apple Comics on the upper west side were just some of the haunts in Manhattan - there were lots of smaller shops that popped up here and there that lasted a few years at a time.

9 hours ago, frozentundraguy said:

Just acquired this Ace PKD double, filling a little gap in my Ace sf double collection. I have about 2 thirds of them now.  Just checked my list, I have 3 PKD Ace doubles to go to complete that subset.

Sweet copy!