Surfing Alien

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...

I'm told this is Boy Comics #1 ...

I was raised on the FF in the Silver Surfer age... and I play a little gitar as well... so... Have a great time at the show... sounds killer!

Mass culture like these paperbacks were the Internet of the 40's and 50's ... it's hard to imagine how isolated culture was before cheap paper and distribution.

She was the Talk of the Town... One of Earle Bergey's best girls...

More Teen-Age Gangsters from Brooklyn... Provocative title...

There are pics of a few on Pinterest from old ebay auctions. The samples there look like late 70's early 80's sci-fi digests and paperbacks.

It's definitely a wild composition - Ironjaw, The Statue of Liberty, and... The He-She... What the heck is going on there??!!

My old copy of the He-She cover that I bought from Howard Rogofsky...

Here's the middle volume of Double Star - I guess they didn't want to put Heinlein on every cover Exploration Team is worthy though!

Great pic - love all those specialty publishers - I've had quite a few over the years but only a short shelf now Bangzoom had an incredible shot of a bookshelf filled with them iirc...

Loving the Sci-Fi, Pat Calhoun!!! ... The only thing better than one hi grade Perelandra is two hi grade Perelandra!!! One of my all time favorite Avon Sci Fi covers... or any sci-fi covers at that!!!

Heinlein at his height of powers... and one of Don Sibley's masterwork covers...