Surfing Alien

It’s funny how you remember this stuff. The first books that I recall considering “vintage paperbacks” as such, were copies of Avon 54 “See What I Mean” by Lewis Browne with the Nazi propaganda cover and Cardinal C-187 “The Blackboard Jungle” by Evan Hunter, both in my mom’s basement which was filled with old books. The first I can recall buying in the outside world when I started seeking them out were dead mint copies of Croydon 13 & 14, “Reckless Virgin” & “Shadows of Lust” with the LB Cole covers. Those were at a yard sale a guy advertised in the local paper as having “vintage paperbacks” He had a medium box full and these were the best and most striking to me. I think I paid $1 each. I wish I still had them as you never see Croydons without creasing.

Sweet trio! I've had the top 2 but never The Kidnaper.

That cover is some nice engineering I'm pretty sure Alan Dean Foster is a fan...

Cross posting this here... a nice Finlay Weird Tales

Another first for me... picked up my first Finlay cover Weird Tales

I had a bunch of these hardcovers when I was a kid - I don't remember what happened to them but they were great to pore over

I guess Homes never heard of Chicago politics lol...

Sweet Charles Binger cover - he did a nice run for Bantam including The Illustrated Man & Brave New World

Some Bantam Philo Vance for your Friday. Although never quite as risque as Avon or Popular Library, Bantam had a cover style all it's own.

Ah!!! Cyrano! Jose! An incredible Bantam graphic...

I think at this time Puritanical America was in full retreat. The Progressive assault on American values reached full throat with Woodrow Wilson in the 20's. None of this was shocking 10-20 years later when the pulps hit the stands...

Drop the mic! These 2 posts are addicting like the Gerber Photo Journal. I counted 5 torture wheel covers in there... plus the July 1939 Terror Tales which is a favorite for 2 obvious reasons!

Anybody here win that nice run of mid 30's Weird Tales on Ebay last night? I hope so. One person got most of them. Some of them went for a relative song. Sorry I missed the closing, I had bookmarked one early in the week but was out "in the sticks" with no signal on my phone last night (and absorbed in a HS football game lol) There's still some bargains on Ebay when you find listings that end on the weekdays.

Vivid picture of the "old days" - although never with pulps in NYC - but I remember times waiting for the guy who got to a find ahead of me to pick through a stack of comics or old paperbacks taking what he wanted and breathlessly "willing" him to pass over ones I wanted...

Congratulations! Looks like a real nice copy too. One of my big regrets is not picking up a copy of this back in the 90’s when I was collecting Arkham’s and they were $600 or so. At some point they will all be in permanent collections. There’s just not that many of them even though most of them that were printed have probably survived since Arkham’s were so prized by their owners.

The postman was kind this week. PIcked up my first real uber-grail Weird Tales - "Black Colossus" - the first Conan story cover, and one of the best imho. Brundage's kneeling nude enthralled by the eerie ancient idol is very... weird!

Love these Schaare covers, really nice compositions and details. I had all the Frederic Brown Bantams in my original collection but I think they all went went i sold most of it in the 90's

Bantam's equivalent of Popular LIbrary's "Campus Town". Roy Flannagan's "The Whipping", Bantam #817 with a classic cover by Schaare

I think Bantam was Frederic Brown's main PB publisher, including the earlier edition of "Dead Ringer" (which James Hadley Chase may have stolen his title from above).

Not enough Bantam love here lately so dropping this Classic Cover on Donovan's Brain... "It was Monstrous...and alive!"

One for the ladies. Almost reads "Serial Husband Hunter" They should've hooked these gals up with Weird tales readers - the back pages of Weird Tales are so filled with lonelyhearts ads... it might lead you to believe the readership base was a loserpalooza

Time for a bump. Eton Books #116, Marijuana Mob by James Hadley Chase falls into both JD and the Hard Boiled genres. Featuring a great Victor Olson cover image of a bunch of thugs and a tramp with her bra hanging out of her shirt. It took me forever to find a copy this nice and fresh.

I was at a Fred Greenberg show in NYC in the 90's when a dealer had a huge table of Harvey's that were being marketed as Harvey File copies. At least 20 long boxes full. I'd say 20-30% of them were badly water damaged and many more had minor stains. There were multiple copies of most issues from many different runs in there. I remember carefully picking through the Black Cat Mystery's and selecting the best copy I could of my favorite, No. 32 (the bondage cover with dancing pygmy). It was the only one I bought and I paid the princely sum of $30. It later graded at CGC 9.4. I can't even fathom the $ I left behind in those bins now. At the time I considered those Harvey's crude, common (partly because so many were in front of me) and the covers mostly unappealing but I guess every dog has its day.

This may be one of those - i'd say it's like a CGC qualified comic grade. Everything about it looks near high grade, but the spine is a bit orange and somewhere along the way the spine bottom got rubbed and the paper there was weaker so it tore. Perfect for me though because I paid nowhere near what a very high grade one costs and it still looks great and is readable. BTW, I use a large 4 mil mylar folded sheet to read these. Anyone else do that? The book just lays in there and you don't have to touch the spine or cover to turn the pages.

Picked up another cool Weird Tales. Brundage cover, H.P. Lovercraft writing as Hazel Heald & a Clark Ashton Smith novelette, among others. There's a spine split and about 1/4" missing from the spine bottom, which may offend perfect spine seekers but the colors on this were so deep, no creasing and nice paper. The more I look around the more I appreciate deep colors on these, so many pulps have faded out colors and paper flaking away. A perfect spine would be nice but I think i'll take some imperfections there over flaky, faded paper.