Amazing Stories was launched in 1926 and was the first publication devoted solely to sci-fi. These issues span January to December 1941. Most of the pieces (those that prominently feature figures) are by the excellent J. Allen St. John. Leo Morey painted February, Stockton Mulford painted July, Robert Fuqua painted September and November, and Rod Ruth painted December. We have a hundred and thirty-three fully scanned issues of this magazine, which is pretty cool, though we’ll probably never have time to read them. But we’ll certainly share more down the line. 

Although there aren’t any psychedelic mushrooms in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Cave Girl, it’s still a fun book. Basically, a wheezy, wimpy, uptight city dweller named Waldo is swept overboard during a Pacific sea journey and fetches up on an island of Neolithic savages. He meets a girl and the rest of the book involves him turning into Rambo in order to defend her from the men of her own undeserving (obviously) tribe. Ultimately it turns out she was never a savage, but rather a regular white chick born on the island twenty years earlier to a shipwrecked American woman. The woman died and the girl was raised as an islander. So it’s a good thing Waldo washed ashore to keep those primitives from defiling her flesh. Burroughs helped pioneer the entire Lost World genre, so despite its flaws, The Cave Girl is worth a read for that reason alone. It began as two separate stories in 1914, was melded into a novel in 1925, and in 1949 was released in the Dell paperback edition you see above, with the title shortened to simply Cave Girl, and with cover art by Jean des Vignes. Interesting and action-packed, this one should keep you entertained for a couple of days, and it’s in the public domain, which means you can download it.

This is one of the most beautiful posters we’ve ever seen. Based on the fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan the Ape Man was the first offering in a film and television franchise that has been sixty-plus years running. It has taken forms as diverse as Bo Derek’s teasingly awful 1981 softcore remake, Jock Mahoney’s 1962 potboiler Tarzan Goes to India, and Casper Van Diem’s 1998 career-killer Tarzan and the Lost City. None of these would have been possible without the original Tarzan, and that film worked for one reason—Romanian-born hunk Johnny Weissmuller. He was not an actor trying to fit the role of a superman, but a superman trying to fit the role of an actor. He was a six foot three inch Olympic swimmer who won 67 world and 52 national titles, and whose physicality radiated from the movie screen. Men wanted to be him, and women wanted to ride his vine. Tarzan the Ape Man premiered in the U.S. today in 1934.