vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man has been reprinted scores of times, with this cover ranking among the best, in our estimation. It was painted by Geoffrey Biggs for Classic Illustrated’s 1959 edition. Below you see the original art, which sold at auction for more money than most people can put together without going on a robbery spree. You can see a bit more from Mr. Biggs here.
When it comes to vintage magazines, the range of prices is incredible. We’ve been seeing issues of Man’s Life online for $168.00. We will go out on a limb and say that nobody will ever pay that price. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we got this issue published January of 1959 for $4.00. The front is a bit mangled but the interior is fine, and includes some nice art, excellent fiction, and four pages on October 1954 Playboy centerfold Madeline Castle. The cover art for Thomas Halloran’s 1930s-era tale “Attacked by the Girl Pirates of the Yangtze” is by Wil Hulsey, and the other spreads are by Geoffrey Biggs, Lou Marchetti, Bruce Minney, and Bruce Minnie (he does two and gets his name spelled two different ways). The Madeline Castle photo feature is uncredited. We’ll have more from Man’s Life a bit later.
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.
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 painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.
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”.
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.
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 more than 2,800 stars.
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.
