Yesterday I finally received what surely is the strangest and rarest piece of Heinlein art I have ever encountered personally: the original typed manuscript for “The Year of the Jackpot,” an engaging and ultimately moving tale that was published as the cover story of the March 1952 issue of Galaxy.

I had always found the piece enjoyable and even in some regards instructive, and I drew upon it, along with Heinlein’s early postwar “world-saving” articles and Farnham’s Freehold and The Number of the Beast and whatnot when I wrote the chapter titled “ ‘Locked in Somewhere Safe’: Robert A. Heinlein and the Bomb Shelter” in my 2015 Critical Insights: Robert A. Heinlein from Salem Press.  Naturally, the Pulp Magazines page of my Heinlein Cover Art galleries contains both the cover art from original Galaxy appearance, along with the interiors.

But now...  Now I have encountered the original manuscript of this story, typed by Heinlein himself, submitted by agent Lurton Blassingame, and hand-marked by the editor at Galaxy.  I have opened the folder and held the yellowed pages in my own hands.  I have smelled them.  Wow, what an exciting find this is for me—47 pages of one-of-a-kind science fiction history.  To me, this is even more special than the signed copy of a book.  Heinlein might have signed a number of various books here and there...but he only submitted a single manuscript copy of this story for publication, and this is it.

In celebration I have opened up a new sub-page under Pulp Magazines, specifically for The Year of the Jackpot Manuscript, and for the delight and edification of like-minded Heinlein aficionados I hope to scan all pages there.

Enjoy!

Rafeeq

Well, this was one of those weird random pick-ups that I simply could not resist: the 1924 yearbook from ​Heinlein’s senior year at Central High School of Kansas City, Missouri.

The piece has a nice little graduation portrait of the author-to-be, along with some smaller ROTC shots.  With great student-done art of the era, along with funky advertisements, the book is a great time capsule of a full century ago, and now I have 8 pics on the On Heinlein page of my Heinlein Cover Art galleries.

Enjoy!

Rafeeq

This is a piece I have been looking for for a long, long time: “Gentlemen, Be Seated” from the May 1948 issue of the long-running former men’s magazine Argosy.  It may not necessarily be Heinlein’s deepest or most memorable tale, but it occupies an interesting place as one of the stories that brought Heinlein from the genre SF pulp magazines such as Astounding Science-Fiction and Unknown and whatnot into the wider readership of “slicks” like The Saturday Evening Post and Town and Country.

The thing is, Argosy is not exactly easy to come by, at least when you’re after a particular issue.  Years I’ve been searching for this one every few months, years...and it sure does feel good to have in my Heinlein collection at last.

In addition to the nicely detailed, good-natured cover painting by Charles Dye, the story also has a pretty decent action-oriented interior illustration by Robert Stanley.

I was excited to pick up two nice old magazines with Ray Bradbury stories.

The first is the Fall 1948 Planet Stories, containing “Mars Is Heaven!,” which of course was collected in the 1949 The Martian Chronicles as “The Third Expedition.”  Interestingly, whereas the book gives the date of this mission as the then-magical 2000, in the original pulp it is a very near 1960.

The other magazine is the 28 June 1952 issue of Collier’s.  This huge periodical has the first publication of Bradbury’s now-classic “A Sound of Thunder,” with a lovely colorful illustration by Frederick Siebel...though I confess that the depiction of the rifles falls a tad flat to my taste.

In any event, speaking of huge, when I say acquired this magazine, I don’t mean that I was able to purchase that single issue, as I did for, say, the 30 August 1947 “Flight to the Future” article by Robert A. Heinlein and Caleb B. Laning.  No, no—nothing quite so simple.  Due to the vagaries of the online market, what was available just then was the entire volume 129 of the magazine, meaning every issue from April and May and June of 1952, bound in a great big 2-inch-thick hardcover, as was done for libraries back then.  Wow.  This creates some slight puzzles in the shelving in my own library, but that tome sure is a neat slice of mid-century American history.

​Oh, finally—  Remember how the familiar version of the story, as printed in The Golden Apples of the Sun, ends with Travis, the guide, clicking off the safety of his rifle, followed by, ahem, a sound of thunder?  Well, apparently this was too edgy for Collier​’s, so when the agonized Eckles asks if somehow they can go back fix things, the story here ends with the scared and angry Travis simply shaking his head.  Ouch...  Oh, well—the magazine was still a wonderful pick-up!

Wow, I guess it has been just short of an entire year since posting...  Not cool.  Still, I at least have been linking my Goodreads reviews religiously the whole time, so...well, that's at least something, isn't it?

​In any event, recently I happened to pick up the February 1953 Thrilling Wonder Stories with Jack Coggins cover art of the mining or exploration of Saturn's rings that I always enjoyed when seeing it in Brian Ash's The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction when I was a kid.  It is handsome and evocative of the flavor of '50s SF, so I have posted it to my Other SF Art - Pulp Magazines page.

Now, I actually have a few more pulp-type items of interest on the way as well.  Hopefully after posting I can bestir myself to update the blog as well...

Enjoy!

​Rafeeq

I was doing some re-shelving work recently, and as I chanced to move some volumes of The Number of the Beast, I thought, Hmm, I only sampled the copious Richard M. Powers interiors of the big Fawcett edition...why don't I just finish them out?

​Well, the reason from, oh, 2016 or 2017 when I posted the existing ones is the fact that there are so many.  That is, in addition to the several I had done back then, which was quite a decent load, there were still nearly 40 more to do...  I finally posted these remaining ones to my Later Works page, though, and they indeed are enjoyable.

This pleasant Richard M. Powers-fest has pushed the number of images in my Heinlein Cover art galleries to more than 1,000.  ONE THOUSAND.  Wow.  That seems like a lotta pics to me, and of course they're all straight from my own collection, nothing scrounged from elsewhere online.  This is a funny hobby, I guess...but fun, too!

Enjoy,

​Rafeeq

Since my last update of around 7 weeks ago, I ended up finding about two-dozen pieces of Heinlein that would be good for my collection...  The great majority were paperbacks with cover art that I previously had not had, although there also were a couple of hardcovers, like a neat New English Library Job: A Comedy of Justice with blonde angels in the clouds working on 1980s desktop computers, a 1951 The Puppet Masters with wonderfully creepy cover art, and a scrupulously correct First Edition Library reprint from the late 1980s or early ’90s of the original 1948 Fantasy Press book printing of Beyond This Horizon that followed its serial appearance in Astounding Science-Fiction​ in 1942.

I also picked up a copy of the 30 August 1947 issue of Collier’s, which has the rare-ish “Flight Into the Future” article written with Cal Laning, which discusses the type of U.N.-controlled orbiting deterrent atom bombs that turn up in Heinlein’s 1948 young-adult novel Space Cadet​.  I find the Rolf Klep interior art charmingly draftsman-like, as always.

Oh, and the reprint of the Beyond This Horizon originally published in 1948 by Fantasy Press?  Well, I already had a 1948 Grosset & Dunlap with the original A.J. Donnell cover art...but what I didn't realize was that the slightly earlier Fantasy Press also had 3 charcoal interiors by a fellow named Robert Breck.  Great.  Now, the way I realized this was not by buying the First Edition Library reprint—which actually came second—but by seeing one of Breck's original pieces for the book, namely the one appearing between pages 148 and 149, available at auction...  When something like a Frank R. Paul or a Frank Frazetta goes up for sale, prices are huge, and even an Emsh can be deadly serious money.  This Breck, however, ended up being not too bad at all, really, so I was able to get it.

All the pieces mentioned above, along with the 20 others I didn’t specifically name, now can be found at the appropriate pages of my Heinlein Cover Art galleries, of course.

Enjoy!

​Rafeeq

In the last couple months I have been fortunate enough to pick up about a dozen more pieces of Heinlein for my collection.  Most, though not all, are paperback reprints of books I already have, of course, but with different cover artwork.

I got 3 or 4 more copies of The Menace from Earth, for example, and 3 more of The Green Hills of Earth, all of which of course are shown on the Collections/Anthologies page of my Heinlein Cover Art galleries.  As seen here, I finally was able to find an old 1951 Shasta first hardcover printing of The Green Hills of Earth with cover art by Hubert Rogers, who had illustrated many Heinlein stories in pulp magazines.  The price wasn't too bad, and I was very glad to get it.

I also came across a kinda funky reprint of Beyond This Horizon, which originally was from the April and May 1942 issues of Astounding Science-Fiction, and now is in the Winter 1952 issue of the magazine titled Two Complete Science-Adventure Novels.  This latter is--as are the earlier Astounding, naturally--on my Pulp Magazines page.  I'm also waiting for an early hardcover British printing of the 1949 Red Planet I had not seen before; having come all the way from Australia, it spent over a week getting cleared in Customs, and I believe it should be arriving shortly.

Perhaps the most peculiar thing I found, though, was The Lucky Bag 1929​...which is the yearbook of the U.S. Naval Academy, specifically for the year Heinlein graduated.  Although the future author himself doesn't yet appear to have any work appearing in this weighty, oversized tome bound in fancy tooled leather, he does receive, like all the other graduates, a page dedicated entirely to his portrait and a mildly comedic biographical blurb.  This great big book really was quite a find, and I am so happy to have it on my shelf at last.  Scans of the cover, of some of the introductory patriotic naval artwork by Henry Reuterdahl, and of course of the Heinlein page itself, are viewable on my On Heinlein page.

Robert A. Heinlein was a fairly versatile writer.  He wrote science fiction; he wrote fantasy.  He wrote short stories; he wrote novels, both for the Scribner's young-adult market and for adults.  He wrote technical reports during the war; he wrote articles for magazines and entries for encyclopedias.

And he wrote a couple of stories about a girl named "Puddin'," which he bylined "R.A. Heinlein" and then peddled to Calling All Girls, also known as Senior Prom after late 1949.  The 1950 "Cliff and the Calories" was reprinted in Expanded Universe back in 1980, but the one I finally got now, "Poor Daddy," wasn't reissued until the posthumous Requiem.  I found "Cliff and the Calories" a few months ago, and it was...a tad pricey.  A few days ago I discovered, and today received, the August 1949 Calling All Girls with "Poor Daddy" for quite a reasonable sum.

The thing is, Calling All Girls is no National Geographic or Time or even Boys' Life.  It's a weird and hard-to-come-by thing, at least if you're hunting a particular issue rather than just wanting to score any random one to sample for a history or sociology project.  I should know--I've had my eye out for these two for literally years.  But now they're here, and I don't need to look for this crazy magazine anymore!

In any event, this one is filed, of course, in my Heinlein Cover Art galleries at Pulp Magazines.

Enjoy,

Rafeeq

In the past half-dozen months I happened to run across another couple of old pseudonymous Heinlein pulps that seem to be a lot harder to find than the more common stuff like "'If This Goes On--'" and "Requiem" and "By His Bootstraps" in Astounding Science-Fiction.  What I picked up now were "Beyond Doubt" in the April 1941 issue of Astonishing Stories and "They Do It with Mirrors" from the May 1947 issue of Popular Detective.

Both of these were pseudonymous, of course--yet not of the common Anson MacDonald byline most of us are familiar with as Heinlein's second-tier name of the early 1940s.  No, "Beyond Doubt" is a Lyle Monroe--a name Heinlein used on only three other stories, it seems--and "They Do It with Mirrors" is by Simon York, a name I don't think he used anywhere else.

Now, "They Do It with Mirrors" was reprinted in the 1980 Expanded Universe, so although I haven't read story in close to 40 years, when I want a reread, I'll probably do so in that newer book.  "Beyond Doubt," though, has never been reprinted, except, I suppose, in the big leather-bound, acid-free, limited-run 46-volume Virginia Edition.  I guess I could read it in the Virginia Edition, but the Astonishing Stories was in pretty decent condition for an 80-year-old pulp magazine, so I simply read it there with some care.  Very satisfying like that.  And that's how, come to think of it, many months earlier still, I did with the elusive "My Object All Sublime" in the February 1942 Future Combined with Science Fiction.

In any event, these recent funky finds now are photographed, and posted to the "Pulp Magazines" page of my "Heinlein Cover Art" galleries.  Oh--  And in the pic here, by the way, note that this interior art is by the famed Hannes Bok.

Enjoy!

Rafeeq