On Collecting: What I've Been Collecting Lately

Plus Reader Feedback and What Have You Been Collecting?

I got into bookselling because of a desire to read and collect old science fiction. Earlier this year I found myself staring into eBay and imagining buying the large lots of vintage science fiction paperbacks that contained books I wanted at a cheap price per book. But I didn’t want all of the books—just the ones that called out to me. I would have to figure out a way to rehome the other books and recover my costs. You know how that turned out but what I want to talk about in this Sunday Special is some of the books I kept from those early acquisitions and a couple others I picked up on their own as little treats for me.

So this is a lot of books and I want to read them all. Most of them I bought on their own merits, a couple because they were part of a numbered set, and one, in part, because of the back story associated with it.

Brief notes for just a few of these: One of my major motivations for making my first big acquisition of 49 books was so I could get that 1948 Pocket Books edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain (top row center) for $2.00. I picked up City by Clifford D. Simak (top row second from left) in a 1954 Permabooks edition for less than $3.00. I wanted the 1952 fixup because it is Simak’s most famous novel and I have never read it despite liking him quite a bit and having previously declared myself a “Simak guy” on Twitter. The 1960 Ballantine H. G. Wells collection (bottom row right) came from the same lot as City and is of self-evident literary quality—it collects short stories by H. G. Wells, one of the fathers of us all.

Now to the ones that are part of a set: I bought The Warriors of Day by James Blish (middle row center and also at the top of this post) and Address Centauri by F. L. Wallace (middle row right) because they are part of a numbered series of novels put out by the publishers of Galaxy in the 1950s. The former I purchased by itself for a little more than $6.00 shipped. The latter I got as part of a lot for less than $4.00.

I am in my Galaxy era right now and I’ll post more about that at a later date. Suffice to say that the Galaxy magazine was a leading science fiction publication of the 1950s and that it was known for its satirical style and heavy-handed editor H. L. Gold. Right now I have three Galaxy novels in hand and a few dozen on the way—some of which are duplicates that may interest you—and I’m also in negotiations to acquire a large number of Galaxy magazines from the Midwestern Collector I mentioned in Wednesday’s post.

In terms of novels, these two are the top of the To Be Read pile. On the left is 1953 Dell edition of A. E. Van Vogt’s infamous 1940 classic Slan. This copy came from the same lot as Address Centauri. Appealing to many science fiction fans’ persecution/superiority complex, the novel is about a mutant orphan in a society that persecutes superior mutants or in the novel’s parlance “slans.” It led to the equally infamous slogan: fans are slans. Basically the idea is that science fiction fans are better than everyone else. One of my friends said it was a dangerous book with bad ideas but gave me permission to read it anyway.

On the right is Into Plutonian Depths by Stanton A. Coblentz, a 1950 Avon edition of a 1931 novel from Wonder Stories Quarterly (a favorite publication of mine but that’s a different post). I paid a premium of $13.00 shipped from a seller on AbeBooks for this because I am particularly interested in sex and gender in pre-1960 science fiction. There are a lot of interesting takes, most of them bad, and I can’t look away till I’ve read them all. I was sold by the premise on the cover of this one: Pluto is a planet with three sexes. What did a man have to say about something like that in 1931? I want to know.

These are potentially less problematic than the two that proceeded them. A month or two ago I read the short story “The Jameson Satellite” by Neil R. Jones (1931). I was blown away. It’s about a professor obsessed with preserving his corpse. He makes his nephew agree to shoot him into space when he dies. There he’s perfectly preserved in a satellite until after the sun turns red when he is found by machine man tentacle aliens who revive him and put his brain into a machine man tentacle body so he can have scientific adventures with them. For me, the story captures strangeness, joy, terror, wonder, and sorrow.

I knew it was the first in a series of short stories but I wasn’t going to follow up. I always say I don’t really go in for series because of the diminishing returns but I have collections of two different editions of Tarzan novels and am a liar. One day I saw an older gentleman on Facebook posting pictures of these 1967 Ace editions collecting the first handful of stories in the series and talking about how much fun he had reading them as a kid back in the 1960s. I got more interested. When I had a chance at them for $2.00 a book, I jumped on it.

These three I got at $2.00/book in the same lot as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and the Professor Jameson collections. I wanted them because I am very into short stories and I am in a period where I am fascinated with science fiction renaissance man Frederik Pohl. Now I haven’t read as much Pohl as I would have liked but I always knew I was going to be interested in him because of his political activism in the 1930s.

I just recently got around to reading Pohl’s memoir The Way The Future Was (1978) and enjoyed reading about the ins of outs of a then-four decade career spent writing and editing science fiction and acting as an agent for science fiction writers. So I decided to acquire these two anthologies he edited, published by Permabooks in 1952 and 1953, and this 1962 Dell edition of a 1955 novel.

Now you might be thinking, “That novel’s cover says it’s by Edson McCann not Frederik Pohl.” McCann was a pseudonym used by Pohl in collaboration with Lester del Rey only once for Preferred Risk. Del Rey was a big selling point on this one for me too. Earlier this year I enjoyed reading his novella Nerves (1942) and his short story “Helen O’Loy” (1938). Apparently Preferred Risk is sort of a “what if” satirical novel where an insurance company becomes the government or some such, which sounds up my alley.

But the back story behind this book also made me want it. The men used a pseudonym for Preferred Risk to enter a contest Galaxy and Simon & Schuster were running to publish a new science fiction novelist. According to Pohl, H. L. Gold couldn’t find a bona fide new novelist worth publishing and pressed Pohl and Del Rey to enter the contest under a fake name.

Reader Feedback

I got three emails in response to Wednesday’s regular newsletter which was the first in this On Collecting series and the first installment of my newsletter where I tried to do more than hawk books. The first was a deeply appreciated inquiry from subscriber in Rhode Island that led to the purchase of seven books.

The second was a very thoughtful email from a subscriber in New York, in part, about the role the market mechanism we call flipping plays in contemporary capitalism. I actually wanted to share some of his thoughts with you but he hasn’t yet answered my query about whether I can or not. Maybe I’ll be able to share it with you in a future newsletter.

The third was a note from a Poul Anderson fan in Texas who used to collect a lot of paperbacks and hardbacks before he ran out of shelf space and had to liquidate many of them. He sent me a picture of the special issue The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction ran on Poul Anderson and was nice enough to buy a book off me. This was the only picture of a collectible that anyone actually sent me in response to my call for them. I’d still like to see pictures of your all’s collections!

I’ve also had some pretty positive exchanges with new subscribers who have won free books. There are a few more winners who I haven’t contacted yet. I’m going to try to reach out tomorrow. And there’s still one free book available to the next purchaser of a book featured in the newsletter so go to my Substack and peruse the back issues of my newsletter.

I really like getting your emails, Facebook chats, and Twitter DMs about science fiction, collecting, the economics of being a vendor, and related topics even if you don’t buy anything. So please do reach out.

What Have You Been Collecting Lately?

You’ve seen how I’ve been spending my discretionary funds accumulating books lately and I’ve told you a little bit about why I bought those particular books. Have you been doing any collecting lately, books or otherwise? And why have you picked out the collectibles you’ve picked out? I’d love to see pictures and read about your passions. I’d like to feature pictures of your stuff in a future installment of On Collecting.

That’s all for now. This coming Wednesday we’ll be taking a break from On Collecting in favor of a promotion for a new personalized book bundle curation service I’ve been marketing over Facebook that I think will help solve the problem a lot of my readers who are newer to this stuff have in figuring out what to buy.