30 TALES OF NIGHT

Gramercy Press brings together some of the earliest and best vampire stories.

As regular readers of this site know, whenever our friends over at National Road Books get their hands on a particularly pulpish title, they send us scans. Yesterday, they e-mailed over a classic—the 1982 collection Weird Vampire Tales from Gramercy Press. Inside are shorts from some of the writers who helped build the foundation horror literature stands upon today. We’re talking August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Greye La Spina, Frank Belknap Long, Seabury Quinn, and many others. The collection also contains Robert E. Howard’s famous “The Horror from the Mound,” a tale set in the old west about a cowboy’s growing suspicions that a nearby Indian burial mound is something entirely different. In all Gramercy packs thirty stories into this hardback, all of them culled from 1930s pulp magazines, and they even top it all off with an illustration by veteran Weird Tales illustrator Virgil Finlay. Highly recommended.

Gramercy Press, Weird Tales, Virgil Finlay, August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, Greye La Spina, Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, cover art, literature

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

February 12

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.

February 12

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.

February 11

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”.

February 10

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.

February 9

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.

February 9

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.