It’s been weeks and weeks and weeks—or perhaps week and week and week, meaning 3 weeks—since I picked up any books, so I popped into Curious Books in East Lansing today for about 15 minutes.  I found a nice late 1970s Vincent Di Fate cover of The Menace from Earth, which now is posted on the “Collections” page of my Heinlein cover art galleries.

Enjoy!

​Rafeeq

At the end of January I was in San Francisco for a couple of days for a conference/vacation.  After up- and downhill hikes of probably 4 to 6 miles each day, and checking in at 4 different used book stores, I picked up a whopping 16 Heinlein covers that I hadn't had!

At a place called Aardvark Books, down Market toward Haight, I found a bunch of random old books I wanted to try, including a nice 1950s Assignment in Eternity whose cover shows a tastefully executed nude reaching evocatively for the planets.  The next day, at a shop in Burma-town over by Presidio called Green Apple Books, which actually is two storefronts just three doors apart, I picked up another 15.  This second load included a first-edition Stranger in a Strange Land hardcover, a nice Carl Lundgren Podkayne of Mars, a Vincent Di Fate Double Star​ I haven't seen for years and years, a lovely Darrell K. Sweet Rocket Ship Galileo—pictured at left—and plenty of others.

All in all, this junket landed me—aside from calluses and extreme fatigue, and a bank account about $240 lighter than when I started—an interesting assortment of 40 books that probably will require around 3 linear feet to shelve.  I haven’t yet taken the plunge on that, though.  They didn't exactly weigh nothing either, shall we say, and in fact completely filled a standard small carry-on bag.  But that was OK, since taking a rail sleeper car those 2,600 miles back allowed not only great sightseeing but also a lower-stress luggage experience.

In any event, all these covers have been scanned, and posted in their appropriate pages in my Heinlein cover art galleries, so that you, too, may enjoy.

Rafeeq