New Arrivals and a chatty post

In early Oct. we snuck off for a week long stay at the Sylvia Hotel in English Bay. This summer we had cancelled a trip to London for the second time and we wanted to do something. I have to say this is one of my favourite spots in the world. There is bay with mountains and cargo ships waiting to unload in front, Stanley Park and it's seawall to the right and Denman street with a huge selection of restaurants to the left. Also tons of people walk their dogs along the shore which makes for great viewing. I love it. Much of the rest of Vancouver is accessible by water taxi or foot and that means bookstores. The book covers span the entire spectrum from "what were they thinking" to pretty cool. 

The first store we visited was also a bindery. I got the Pangborn, (cover by Richard Powers)  and Helen was able to get a very interesting edition of Alice in Wonderland. Since the main thing we missed in London was the Alice exhibit at the V & A, this was only fair. 

The next was a small shop called The Paper Hound, which actually only had a couple of shelves of science fiction amid other wonderful holding, I got my first but probably not last Rupert Annual. Okay I bought the 2021 at our neighbourhood British Pantry the other day. Since I am indecisive and the book shop was central to several areas we planned to visit and since Helen is good natured enough to put up with a lot, we visited three times over the course our stay. We next visited a large used bookstore with mounds and towers of books everywhere and over priced PKD aces in glass cases. But I realized the internet may have spoiled this kind of chaos for me, plus their SF holding overall seemed insufficient for the size of the shop and uninteresting we bought nothing there.

https://paperhound.ca

The Paper Hound however while small was beautifully curated.  

A lovely understated cover by Daniel Schwartz.

The Lessing series is the kind of vast impenetrable British/European future history of human kind that haunts my shelves and TBR pile. Jacket Design by David Proust. 

I did not buy this very reasonably priced Shasta first edition until my third visit. I hate the cover of this man in what is obviously his Mom's housecoat so much. Looking at it again Mom must have been pretty tall. However as I lay awake in my bed at the Sylvia listening to the rain. (Immortalized in the Blue Rodeo song English Bay here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrhL5yAS2jI) 

I heard the rest of my Van Vogt collection remonstrating with me. It was after all family. Harold W. McCauley claimed credit for this, why?

God knows, I bought it for the cover by Harry Borman and a rather confused summary on the back. The summary claims SF roots, the cover seems more sword and sorcery.

This is a wonderful cover by Alan Brooks. 

This was interesting . I knew I had to buy A Ticket to Nowhere but left it where it was displayed on the shelf while I looked around, Helen then appeared with it and said you have to get this for your collection. She was right.

I have discussed the UK publisher Badger books several times, a great discussion and the first place I learned about them is at this link from the wonderful unsubscribed blog, sadly no longer updated.

 https://unsubscribedblog.wordpress.com/2014/10/19/book-on-sunday-doom/

Vega books in Clovis California seems to have reprinted some Badger books with the same covers. However the ISFDB does not indicate this was the case here. I see no other novels listed for Don Begher, but authors for both Badger and Vega often seemed to use house names. Helen and I both loved the juxtaposition of the strange craft and log cabin. The cover was unattributed.

Sayers is my favourite mystery writer and one of the few I still read. These also fall into the great cover category. The covers were unattributed?

A couple more vacation snaps. Happy Reading. 

New Arrivals Soviet SF and a Badger Book

 Some years ago my wife and I visited London. A visit to the Barbican Estate was on our list. We have long been interested it this complex as an example of British brutalist architecture. It is on my list of cool places to live should I ever win (really really big) on the lottery. We had just missed the exhibit Into the Unknown A journey Through Science Fiction, but I bought the catalogue.

The first two illustrations below come from this catalogue.

I have just received Soviet Space Graphics, Cosmic Visions from the USSR  by Alexandra Sankova from a local bookstore and I knew Into The Unknown discussed the topic as well in the chapter, "Space Odysseys, Visions of the Cosmos in Soviet Science Fiction" by Alyona Sokolnikova. So I wanted to look at both essays as well as the illustrations. Soviet Space Graphics is a great book. The introductory essay is only about five pages long but the book is lavishly illustrated, some 267 in total. The reproductions are a bit matte but they allow one to get a real overview of the different styles that were employed over the years. 

One thing that struck me immediately was the similarities between these illustrations and those found in the science fiction pulp magazines of this period. They were also quite reminiscent to the more futuristic covers of general technical magazines like Popular Mechanics. 

https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2017/08/new-arrivals-sequel-popular-mechanics.html

In discussing the new Soviet era periodicals Sokolnikova notes "A significant number of these publications focused their attention on the exploration of Earth, its subterranean and oceanic depths, as well as the endless mysteries of outer space-each of the frontiers representing the promise of a bright, new Communist future." (8) 

These were not, at least initially, fiction magazines intended for entertainment. Sokolnikova tells us that, "In 1934, the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers was held. At this event, the genre of science fiction was defined exclusively as ' literature for young people' which was required to focus on readers' scientific and technical education in the spirit of social realism. Ideas about human flight were criticized as being too remote from everyday needs, and even utopian. Hence a more pragmatics genre of the science fiction essay, devoid of literary plot, evolved 5." (55) what a buzz kill, it sounds a bit like John Campbell's essays/diatribes in Analog education not fun. Sokolnikova notes that in the late 1960's the work of the Strugatsky's among others spurred the growth of a softer less technical or adventure oriented science fiction from the Soviet Union. 

And for something completely different, or is it? Maybe it's just a different vision of the future? I became interested in Badger books after following the unsubscribedblog's Badger Book on Sunday, posts. Now whenever I see one at an almost reasonable price, especially with the kind of garish covers I love I cannot resist. This cover is by Eddie Jones. Is it just me or is our hero standing in an old style a beer glass surrounded by equipment purloined from a hair salon. Now that is science!

https://unsubscribedblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/a-badger-book-on-sunday-with-the-reverend-r-l-fanthorpe-chapter-24/

New Arrivals; Shaun Tan, Edward Gorey and others

I have been working on a number of posts recently. However, planning for a stay at the cabin and general lassitude have combined to delay the process. So I have decided to put together a post on some of the new additions to my library. A number of Free Libraries (small houses on posts containing free books) have sprung up on the lawns in our neighbourhood. Today, while walking the dogs we discovered a nice copy of Starship Troopers with a great cover by Carl Lundgren. Heinlein can be a divisive author today, and this is one of his more controversial works. I would suggest reading Alan Brown's "A Genre Cornerstone: Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein" on Tor.com. Brown's analysis of the significance the protagonist Johnnie (Juan) Rico within the novel is quite informative.

https://www.tor.com/2016/09/06/a-genre-cornerstone-starship-troopers-by-robert-a-heinlein/

Next, some items from a trip to Fair's Fair Used Books. 

Cover by John Clarke

I have been rereading some Roger Zelazny lately (the subject of an upcoming post on comfort reading) so I took advantage of the opportunity to get a hardcover copy the SFBC edition of his rather quirky Doorways in the Sand. 

  

I cannot resist a Badger Book, the plots and writing may be hackneyed in the extreme but the covers, oh the covers, in this case, a gem by H. Fox always appeal to me. 

Cover by Ron Walotsky

When looking up Philip Wyle I learned the following from Wikipedia, 

"During World War II, writing The Paradise Crater (1945) resulted in his house arrest by the federal government; in it, he described a post-WWII 1965 Nazi conspiracy to develop and use uranium-237 bombs,[3] months before the first successful atomic test at Alamogordo – the most highly classified secret of the war.[4]"
^{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wylie}

Sadly this story does not seem to have been reprinted.

I have not counted the number of copies of Earthlight I have but again the cover by Vincent di Fate drew me in, I think I passed this up on my last trip and regretted it.

Cover by Bob Pepper

I have decided to include a couple of gifts. A friend picked up this Poul Anderson for me at a Canadian Legion sale. The Corgi edition of H. G. Well's The Shape of Things to Come came from the library of another friend who purchased it on a trip to the UK many years ago and it will be discussed in more detail in a future post, combined with John Kessel's great short story, "The Last American". Sadly the lovely cover art is unattributed, if you know who is responsible please leave a comment. 

 

And if you have lasted this long, some non-science fiction. Pages is an independent bookstore in Calgary, and yesterday we found they had opened a second store, The Next Page in Inglewood. I never leave empty-handed and I purchased most of the books below at one of the two locations. 

(Tales From The Inner City actually came from Chapters) 

Shaun Tan is a wonderful Australian illustrator and author. "He won an Academy Award for The Lost Thing, a 2011 animated film adaptation of a 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaun_Tan (I bought a copy of The Lost Thing for my adult niece.) His books often combine his wonderful illustrations with social commentary, you should take a look.

http://shauntan.net/

And my wife and I are long time Edward Gorey fans.

Jacket Design by Jim Tierney, Jacket Photograph by Richard Corman

What do you see when you read

Some time ago Emily Asher-Perrin posted an article on Tor.com asking:

"How Do You “See” the Books You Read?"

https://www.tor.com/2019/02/13/how-do-you-see-the-books-you-read/

Based on the fact there were 75 comments, her essay did seem to strike a chord with people. So I am also asking, do you just read the words or do you create visual images of the places and characters the author describes? I was is my late 50's before I realized that other people did (I don't). I attribute some of this to skimming the text, but I have also noticed this inability to form a visual image using my imagination when trying to pick frames for a picture or paint from a sample. (just ask Helen) I need to see the thing complete. 

I wonder if that is part of the reason that science fiction illustration is so important to me. I own multiple copies of the same book because of the covers. I will buy one to read but then be seduced by a "better" possibly more representative cover. They don't need to be representative, I like artists was diverse as Weird Tales alumni like Hannes Bok and Virgil Finlay, the Gernsbeckian Frank R. Paul or the increasingly surreal/abstract stylings of Richard Powers but something just calls to me. That said, traditional SF tropes, space ships and suits, alien landscapes, futuristic cities and powers plants really attract me. I have discussed what conjures up science fiction to me in earlier posts, something I will come back to again and again. 

http://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2018/06/science-fiction-and-me-why-i-read-what.html

Here are a couple of new arrivals that are certainly candidates based on the covers. They also have a bit of a WWII vibe (at least to me) based on the style of the suits and equipment, which reminds me of the b&w films of my youth.

Cover by H. Fox (1962)

Cover by Gordon C. Davies (1957)

New Arrivals - Badger Books, Lion Books, Harlequin

We have just returned from two weeks in Saskatoon. Helen's family lived near Westgate Books, so I visited it several times. I found their science fiction section uninspired with nothing terribly old and no magazines. The last time I almost literally bumped into the owner as he came out of the back room. He asked what I was looking for and when I asked about Analogs he said we might have a few, went to the front and put two file books labeled collectable SF on a stand. I had assumed the boxes where books waiting to be sorted. But they were not, they were the good stuff. A number of interesting items had to be returned to the box as I tried to rein in my spending a bit. I still failed.

Westgate has an interesting history which is related here.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/westgate-books-owner-donates-entire-collection-to-employee-1.3046878

Someone obviously liked Fritz Leiber as there were a number of his titles. I loved the Jack Gaughan cover and it also contained the first appearance of Niven's Louis Wu character. 

A lovely cover by Russell FitzGerald for Patrick Meadows "Pater One Pater Two". A review of "Barbarella" by Samuel Delany and "The Cave" by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Who doesn't like a domed city, cover by Frank R. Paul for his conception of "Glass City on Europa". It also contained "The Revolt of the Pedestrians" by David H. Keller, a very old fashioned vibe for 1966.

I am always on the lookout for Harlequin SF as they began in Winnipeg Manitoba. Cover by Friede?

 

I became interested in Badger books after following the unsubscribedblog's Badger Book on Sunday, posts. The cover is by Ed Emshwiller and as is not uncommon with some British SF, the image has appeared elsewhere.

https://unsubscribedblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/a-badger-book-on-sunday-with-the-reverend-r-l-fanthorpe-chapter-24/

   

I have never seen a title by Lion Books before, if anyone has any information on them I would love to know more. The Haploids (1953) cover is by Rafael DeSoto.

My initial thought was that this was a Badger Book, Pel Torro is one of their house names and the unattributed cover's style is similar. But this title was released by Tower Books and ISFDB did not indicate a Badger Book edition.

Four Square Books (1961) cover unattributed.

   

Cover by Vincent Di Fate.

 

More Leiber, R cover by John Schoenherr L cover by Jack Gaughan

 

The unsubscribed blog also posted some lovely images of the wrap around covers done by 

Chris Yates for titles by E.C. Tubb.

https://unsubscribedblog.wordpress.com/2016/01/20/three-chris-yates-wraparounds/

 

Two covers by Robert Foster that I was looking for.