Reading Diary and Curated Book-Magazine Bundles

Plus New Business Card, Non-SF/F Books for Sale and Event Reminder

Dig my new business card. Pretty cool, right? That rocket ship isn’t really my logo. This is just a sensible and generic business card I found on Zazzle so I would have something to hand out at events around town this summer like the Grand Opening of the Mad Axe this weekend (see end of post).

I’d like to have a permanent logo and business card before the end of July when I head to PulpFest. If you’re into graphic design I could pay you or maybe we could set up some kind of barter. Hit me up.

Reading Diary

This week all I have to report back on is “The Last Martian,” a short one by Fredric Brown first published in the inaugural issue of Galaxy Science Fiction dated October 1950. From a few different sources, I now have a near complete run of Galaxy and it would be fun to read all of it but I’m not going to publicly commit to that because I am interested in other things too and I’m still barely picking my way through The First Men In The Moon by H. G. Wells and The Alley God by Philip José Farmer which I took on vacation weeks ago and am nowhere near finishing.

Anyway, “The Last Martian” opens when a newspaper man gets called from the newsroom to a nearby watering hole because the editor-in-chief and the barkeep think there may be a good human interest angle in a man drowning his sorrows. The angle? The man believes he is a Martian who has entered a human’s body.

The putative Martian still remembers things the human does and has his craving for beer. But he also remembers waking up in some kind of sealed room on Mars to find all the other Martians dead. He tells a story about going from city to city on Mars in a helicopter-like craft finding nothing but dead. Eventually he find a bunch of dead Martians gathered in a stadium around a device with a big button on it. Naturally he pushes the button and finds himself in the body of a human man.

The newspaper man has a solution for him: go home to his wife and pretend like nothing has happened. The reporter says that the man may have a Martian’s thoughts mixed up in his head but that he should embrace his human identity. The worried man assents to this and plans to return home to his by then worried wife.

All seems well until the newspaper man reports back to the editor-in-chief. Here Brown does an info dump via dialogue revealing that the reporter and his boss are Martians who have taken over human bodies as all Martians have. The man who thought he was the last Martian was a low IQ individual accidentally left behind in a mental institution. Fortunately for him, a low IQ Martian is about as intelligent as an average human. The two Martians’ discourse further reveals that the Martians plan to take over.

It’s a little bit cute but competently crafted and any deficiencies were minimized by its brevity. Not a banger like “The Star Mouse” but I’m not put off reading more Brown.

Curated Book-Magazine Bundles

I’ve mentioned in passing and in conversation that I’m now doing curated book-magazines bundles, in addition to the standard curated book bundles, but haven’t written at length about it or advertised for the service. Since it has just been word of mouth on these, I’ve only put together three of them so far but I’m pretty pleased what I’ve come back with so far.

Above is a bundle I put together for a customer who likes Ursula K. LeGuin and is on the left and interested in politics. They got an Ace Double with an early Hainish novel, an Ace Double with a political novel from socialist Mack Reynolds and two digest magazines with stories about class and politics.

I like to put a lot of care into bundles and the magazines expand the medium I can work in if only because they give me the opportunity to include illustrated stories from a broader group of authors. I also liked working on this bundle in particular because I’m into selling people on the formats of the back to back bound Ace Double novel and the digest-sized magazine.

The other book-magazine bundle I want to report back on was for a customer who asked me to keep a look out for any queer science fiction. Of course, instead of passively waiting for it to come to me, I spent a few nights online researching vintage science fiction by queer people and with queer themes and working my way through three used bookshops and a lot of eBay lots to come back with something I thought was very neat.

Over the course of my research, I found out that Edgar Pangborn and Thomas M. Disch, both of whom I’ve meant to read but never have, were gay men and that one should look into their novels A Mirror For Observers and On Wings of Song. Because I am into treasure hunts and I think magazines are cool, I managed to put together the original serializations of the latter and of Joanna Russ’ harrowing-seeming novel We Who Are About To… To balance things out, I thought it would be good to throw in some science fantasy; in this instance, The Heritage of Hashtur which I understand to be Marion Zimmer Bradley’s gayest Darkover novel. Far from me to pretend this bundle is definitive, but it pleased my customer and putting it together was rewarding for me.

I hesitate to quote a general price range on these because I don’t want to limit what I am able to do for a customer who is willing to pay for it but if you want one of these you can certainly give me a personal price range. If you’re interested in a personalized book-magazine bundle, initiate a conversation with me over email, Facebook chat, Twitter DM, or you can use the button below.

Non-SF/F Books and Magazines for Sale over on Facebook

Over the past couple of days I’ve processed a lot of non-SF/F books into my inventory to get ready for tabling at the Grand Opening of the Mad Axe (see below) this weekend. Since I have so many of these priced and ready for sale, I thought I would give my online audience a crack at my non-SF/F treasure trove by posting it to Facebook earlier today. I have Western, Romance, Adventure, Espionage and Mystery paperbacks all priced at $5/book or $20 for five books plus s&h which is media mail plus $1. I also have fifteen issues of the pulp magazine Exciting Western priced to move at $10/issue. You can peruse these offerings here.

Event Reminder: Grand Opening of the Mad Axe on Friday, April 26 and Saturday, April 27. (I won’t be there Sunday.)

As I’ve been repeating throughout this post, I will be at the Mad Axe for their Grand Opening this weekend. Come enjoy axe-throwing, billiards, malt beverages, live music and local craft and boutique vendors like me. I’ll be there on Friday and Saturday but not Sunday. Watch my Facebook page and I’ll post when I’m setting up and breaking down each day.