My dad is cleaning out his studio bookshelves and I’m receiving boxes of books. I found this one in the last shipment. It’s from 1943, edited by Donald Wollheim, one of the founders of modern American sci-fi as a writer, editor and fan.
The cover still looks great and has flying cars. Flying cars are always off in the future aren’t they?
The book has a few stories I hadn’t come across before (see below).
Sadly the book is in its last stages. It can still be used, but it’s close to its last read. There is no price on it, though on the back it says “Ship this book to a boy in the armed forces anywhere for-only 3¢”
It’s a Pocket Book Inc. release and doing a bit of research it turns out that Pocket Books produced the first mass-market, pocket-sized paperback books in America. Starting in 1939. Its now a division of Simon and Schuster. I have 25 or 30 old paperbacks I am making my way through. They are next to worthless I suppose but I enjoy them for a lot of reasons. The old paperback smell reminds me of the libraries and of my dad’s studio too. Also the excitement of seeing what was at the time a brand new Big Idea. Paperbacks. Cheap books to bring great literature (or not so great) to everyone. They have a unique energy and display some odd design choices because it was all so new. And science fiction was slowly making its way into the minds of millions of readers. I troll these books looking for early stories by Philip K. Dick and other sci-fi writers that enamored me when I was young.
And how can you beat ‘Fantastic Tales of Super-Science’ across the top.
That cover is superb! I have an equally knackered paperback from the 70′s titled Final Stage which includes a Philip K. Dick short story ‘A Little Something for Us Tempunauts’. Read it in the bath just the other day! Classic.
I have a great story, very fitting to Philip K Dick’s work, on how I discovered him. My mom told me I could pick out one book at a bookstore one day. I was in maybe 7th grade. I walked to the sic-fi section and just picked a book. It was VALIS. I’ve been obsessed with his writing ever since. But I always found it odd that I was drawn to that single book amongst shelves of books.
Flying cars always remind me of that comment from Mystery Science Theater 3000 about “the old future.” Remember how eveyone thought we’d have those flying cars and be ttaveling all around outer space by the 21st Century, but no one predicted the Internet or iPads or MP3 players? When January 1, 2001 rolled around, i made a comment to my friends, “Wait, aren’t we supposed to be living on the Moon by now?” Somehow the future is always cooler in sci-fi. Anyway, that book is a cool find. Thanks for sharing.
It’s interesting to me how those BIG sci-fi ideas of the 1930′s mostly missed computers. I remember watching the old Buck Roger’s serials, and at one point they are on their ship, flying towards some ominous planet and they decide they need to get some information. They walk back and there is a shelf with books and encylpedias on it. They quickly ‘look it up’ in that super-modern device – The Book. The ability to fly through space was imagined, but not a way to electronically store and retrieve information. That sheds some light on how we think about the future and how sci-fi often misses the baby-steps on the way to the big stuff.
By the way, thanks for the inspiration:
http://benjaminherman.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/not-all-futures-are-created-equal/
Damn, I wish we still lived in the same town so I could come over and borrow a few books; I love me some Golden/Silver Age sci-fi!
It’s fun too look through them. I love the older sci-fi books and the pulp covers from the 50′s.
I suspect both the Heinlein and Sturgeon story are worth reading…. The others are probably average/bad.
There is certainly a charm to these classic short stories. Similar to that of the old Twilight Zone episodes. Something timeless about them.
[...] paperback short story collection (UPDATE: I finally located that post again, which can be viewed at this link) . The art was what you might regard as your typical mid-20th Century vision of the future: an [...]