RACK EM UP

So many choices, so little time.


We found this interesting photo on Reddit. It shows an actual pulp rack at the Detroit Metro Airport in 1959. It’s amazingly full. We had no idea the racks offered this level of choice. Jonathan Latimer once famously described his books as being about, “booze, babes and bullets,” and the choices shown here certainly reflect the simple enticements of popular mid-century fiction. We were surprised and pleased to find that we own three of those shown. Carter Brown’s The Dame and None but the Lethal Heart, and Edmond Hamilton’s The Star of Life, are currently in our holdings. Seeing them on an actual spinning rack circa late-1950s is cool. It gives them new life for us.

Speaking of new, the international mails have been working flawlessly of late, and we’ve received some very choice items, including a stack of digest novels from Uni, Rainbow, and similar imprints, and some Dell and Signet crime paperbacks. We’ve already begun posting some of this stuff, for example The Nude Stranger and Dirt Farm. We also got our hands on the novelization of the blaxploitation film Coffy. Look forward to that. And on top of everything else, we also bought some fun French nudie mags, and a fresh lot of periodicals from Australia, including more issues of Adam, Man, and Man Jr. We’ll get to scanning and you can expect those to start popping up pretty soon.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the panting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.

1960—Woodward Gets First Star on Walk of Fame

Actress Joanne Woodward receives the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Los Angeles sidewalk at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street that serves as an outdoor entertainment museum. Woodward was one of 1,558 honorees chosen by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1958, when the proposal to build the sidewalk was approved. Today the sidewalk contains nearly 2,800 stars.

1971—Paige Enters Baseball Hall of Fame

Satchel Paige becomes the first player from America’s Negro Baseball League to be voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Paige, who was a pitcher, played for numerous Negro League teams, had brief stints in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Major Leagues, before finally retiring in his mid-fifties.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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