Surfing Alien

It's a Brave New World... What I love most about PB's is that they're still in the wild. Just picked this up... I actually had a great copy years ago but let it go for some trade reason. One of the best cautionary tales and an amazing cover by Singer,,,,

Early Pockets are kinda like Pre-Robin Tec's of PB's... They have that "early" feel - This 2 volume set is a keeper.

Pennies for Gold.... I missed this when it just happened or it'd be mine... Never see this so nice. When the Top of the Hobby is a hunnerd or two.... https://www.ebay.com/itm/NAKED-ON-ROLLER-SKATES-By-MAXWELL-BODENHEIM-1949-DIVERSEY-PAPERBACK-SLEAZE-GGA/142677504123?hash=item21383df07b:g:52IAAOSwLnladPI6

Fritz Leiber goodness... These Royal Giants are hard to preserve...

When Biro was good, he was very very good, but when he was bad, he was horrid. I think this is the top of his powers re composition, Gun Moll etc etc...

224???!!!

223... Alex Schomburg...???!!!

Yes!!! 217!!!

Somewhat... That would make this a "Classic Headlight" cover maybe?...

Maybe a "Flashlight" cover?

I'm fairly sure that every party would say that this was the other party's voter lol!

I think this is one of the best John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson covers in Pocket Books. Pocket got a little more experimental and daring starting in the very late 1940's This is 1949 by Louis Glanzman, who did some cool comic book work (along with his brother, Sam Glanzman) but this is just a really nice composition and detail execution

That "really" looks like The Shadow back there...

Classic Belarski...

Great writer... John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson... I actually didn't realize this was an "early" Pocket total number imprint until I saw your post and dragged out my copy!!!

A really cool thing is this late 1940's period when Pocket Books listed, presumably, their total number of copies printed at the top of their books. I think that number surely is larger than the number of all the books ever privately printed before the paperback revolution...

This is a big fat book... haven't seen any super clean copies like this that don't have the slight edge bends like this one does but oh well... The cover is so cool...

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

Red Insects are bad...

Curtis Books titles like "Bio-Muton" are awesome - they really had some wild covers. "Chloroplasm" is from the same HG stash as "The Time Bridge" - Weird alien doing strange needle activities on a bondage babe in the vacuum tube...

Wow... My Friends Bookstore... it was an incredible place for kids in Flatbush back then. Always hated that they price marked all the comics they had in the bins in the corner where the CCA stamp was. You could always tell a book that came from there by the magic maker price in the corner. I have a friend who still has his whole childhood collection including hundreds of those books. For years they had a copy of All Star #36 with the Superman Batman cover on top in the glass case up front where they kept the good stuff. I assembled a collection of Spider-Man back to #2 and FF back to #3 from that case. They're long gone but I still remember what they looked like. The bookstore on 86th Street was a similar type place. I think it was near 20th or 21st Avenue. It was still there into the 90's and they had a significant back stock of the Marvel Key Golden Record Reprints for $15-$25 each depending on how the owner felt that day. They must have been from a warehouse as they had dozens of them. I bought several of each back then, including some NM ones, and used them for trade bait. They also still had random hoards of 60's Marvels - I remember a short box of Marvel Superheroes #12 & Ghost Rider (1967) #1's that I picked some out of. I still have one of the Ghost Rider #1's. At the Seuling shows in the mid 70's , we considered it a "good show" if you saw Action 1 and/or Detective 27 there, which was quite often. They were in the several hundreds of dollars and up range at the time. One time a guy was showing a dealer a stack of books, each separated by a piece of cardboard. He started flipping the cardboards over one at a time and we were amazed to see 2 copies of Detective 27 in a row. I'd love to know where they are now.

I picked up a nice high grade short stack of these incredible 50's British Scion books back when I was assembling my core stuff... Nothing like a mysterious babe encased in an Orb...

No doubt Overstreet was a market maker for comics. There are guides for these other paper books but not the every year consistency Overstreet provided.

Harlan was definitely banging against the walls when he wasn't knocking the doors down...

Flash forward 30 years and sci-fi/horror writers were still writing about super-computers...