COMING UP SHORT

It’s great that you’re early to rise, sweetie. Too bad you’re also quick to finish.

Above, the cover of Arnold E. Grisman’s Early To Rise with art by Robert Maguire. It’s a rags to riches story about a young guy fresh out of the army who becomes a fabric dye tycoon. Doesn’t sound thrilling, does it? Well, there are also trade secrets, connections to Indian maharajahs, and romance, if that helps. 1958 on this originally, with the Berkeley paperback appearing in ’59. 

She really isn’t dressed for this, but luckily neither is he

Andrew Garve’s The End of the Track was published in 1955, with this Berkeley Books paperback appearing in 1958. Garve, who was actually British author Paul Winterton and also wrote as Roger Bax and Paul Somers, livens up the thriller formula a bit here by pitting a forest ranger and his wife against two blackmailers, then mixing in a wilderness blaze that kills one villain but leaves the other missing. When police suspect the ranger of incinerating the blackmailer intentionally, he’s suddenly the focus of a murder investigation even as the other crook needs to be dealt with. The stunning, almost sepia toned art here is uncredited—a crime in itself.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

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.

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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