Not too long after I picked up that nice copy of the February 1951 issue of Galaxy with Bradbury's pre-Fahrenheit 451 "The Fireman," I happened to see an auction of books and comics and whatnot that contained, among many, many other things, the March, April, and May 1954 issues of Playboy that serialized the full novel after its original 1953 printing...

Hmm, thought I, these might be nifty things to pick up...  Still, trying to be a responsible shopper, I poked around the internet to see if any other copies were for sale and if real money was being asked for them.  The answers were Yes and Definitely yes.  I approached the auction with a bit of trepidation, though.  That is, the first few bids were lowish, tantalizingly suggestive of a possible bargain.  In an auction, however, it's easy to see something that starts out as a deal rapidly become a hole into which you suddenly realize you threw, ahem, maybe a little too much money.  This is doubly the case when it's not a single item you're after but two or even three related ones...any single one of which rather falls flat when purchased alone.  What happens if you get #1 for a decent price, after all, but someone else really wants #2 and the price on that one doubles or even triples...?

The opening of the final stage of the auction was nerve-wracking, but bidding was not too bad, and I was able to get these three magazines for a sum I thought was at least halfway tolerable.  I mean, I wouldn't want to spend that much on books every week, but sometimes you have to splurge a little on a really nice piece of literary history, don't you?  Don't you...?

In any event, I received these three great pieces of Bradbury history, and now the apropos artwork is scanned to the "Pulp Magazines" page of my "Other SF Art" archives.

Enjoy!

Rafeeq

Before Ray Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451 as a novel in 1953, it originally appeared in a novella only about half that size in Galaxy​ in 1951.  I had known this for a good 40 years, having read Bradbury's account of the process...but only recently did I find a copy that wasn't prohibitively expensive.

Naturally, I bought it.

I scanned the beautiful Chesley Bonestell cover, an unrelated but gorgeous piece of art.  I scanned the interior art for "The Fireman" as well.  All now are posted to the "Other SF Art -- Pulp Magazines" page of my web.

And then I read the Bradbury.

How does it compare with the fuller Fahrenheit 451?  Well, "The Fireman" is much smaller and faster, not nearly as polished, and the reader is always thinking, "Oh, but where's--?" or "Is he gonna say--?"  The piece is a fascinating historical artifact, but quite a rough draft for those of us used to the novel.

Montag's first name is Leonard--no Guy Fawkes-ism yet.  Faber has a first name, too.  Beatty is Leahy.  Yet despite the 2052 date in the first page, unlike in the novel, the setting is more reminiscent of the time of writing, with no full-wall televisions yet, just actual TV sets and radios and even crap-magazines.  There's no green bullet from Faber, so we just plain old don't see him again until after the showdown.  Interestingly, Beatty's lecture over Montag's sickbed is just a teeny bit more specific on the "minority pressure" aspect than in the novel.

Once Montag reveals the books to Millie, he gets her--amazingly, to our minds now--to agree to daily readings, with him trying to teach her.  Montag actually is a tad bloodthirsty in a couple of places where thinking about the revolution, less diffident than in the more slowly unfolding novel.  And the Hound--  Why, the Mechanical Hound doesn't appear until almost the end!  There are no creepy firehouse growlings, therefore, no offhand mention of suicide by Hound, no electronic snuffling under Montag's door.  And it's called the Electric Dog, fer God's sake...  Wow.

Still, the novella is definitely worth the read.  And at least here you may enjoy the visual art as well!

​Rafeeq

A while ago I had scanned a few pieces of neat Frank Frazetta art from hardcover copies of a couple of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels and put them in my “Other SF Art” gallery.

Over the past year, though, I also found myself picking some other interesting hardcovers of the 1940s and ’50s, including first editions—signed!—of Jack Williamson’s classic Darker Than You Think and, more recently, Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier and Dreadful Sanctuary.

​Well, this seemed to call for a new page, didn’t it?  Maybe one specifically called “Vintage Hardcovers”?  At last, therefore, this page is up, and it has some really nice old art by J.A. Donnell and Edd Cartier.

Enjoy!

​Rafeeq

​In the past couple of months I’ve picked up a number of nifty pieces for my “Heinlein Cover Art” galleries.
 
At the wonderful Dawn Treader bookshop of Ann Arbor I got a quaint Steele Savage cover for Red Planet—a painting that unfortunately does not catch the three-leggedness of Heinlein’s Martians as Darrell K. Sweet of course does—and a few more things.  On ye olde internet I also at last found the March 1959 F&SF with “ --‘All You Zombies’.”

In addition, I was able to pick up even rarer things like the April 1941 Astonishing Stories with “Beyond Doubt,” the May 1940 Super Science Stories with “Let There Be Light” (pictured here), the November 1941 Super Science Stories with “Lost Legacy,” the March 1942 Astonishing Stories with “Pied Piper”…and a few more paperbacks I can’t quite recall.  I also finally got my own copy of the June 1952 Popular Mechanics showcasing Heinlein’s then-futuristic house.
 
Oh, yes—and I posted some gorgeous Frank Frazetta art from Edgar R. Burroughs’ Barsoom novels in my “Paperbacks, Etc.” gallery.
 
Enjoy!
 
Rafeeq

I was on the prowl for some more nifty Heinlein recently, and I picked up a cool 1953 copy of The Man Who Sold the Moon with the classic original Hubert Rogers cover art, plus a first edition Assignment in Eternity with a gorgeous Ric Binkley cover showing the domed lunar hideout of the villainous Mrs. Keithly of “Gulf.”

This has become one of my favorite Heinlein covers, and of course both of these are now posted in the Collections/Anthologies page of my Heinlein Cover Art galleries.

Enjoy!

Rafeeq

Recently a friend of mine was in Germany, and she kindly picked me up a neat German-language copy of Sixth Column.  Danke, mein fraulein!

Originally the tale was serialized in Astounding Science-Fiction, in January, February, and March of 1941 under the Anson MacDonald byline, of course, and scans of the Hubert Rogers cover art and Schneeman interiors can be seen in the Pulp Magazines page of my Heinlein Cover Art galleries.

Afterward the piece was published in book form in 1949, under this title and also as The Day After Tomorrow.  In any event, the cover art for this version of the book, like the others, is posted in my Earlier Adult Works page.

Enjoy!

​Rafeeq

Lately I’ve been picking up some stray Heinlein that my collection has lacked, and although I haven’t blogged about all the incoming pieces, here’s a random piece of interest: a reprint of the 1952 story  “Sky Lift” in the August 1958 issue of a semi-girlie magazine called Rogue for Men.  In addition to a number of racy photos, though, there also is a nifty illustration for the Heinlein story by D. Bruce Derry.  This—along with the shots from original appearance in Imagination, of course—can be found in the Pulp Magazines page of my Heinlein Cover Art galleries.

Enjoy!

Rafeeq

In the cataloging project of my personal library, at last I’m through allllllllllllllll of my Heinlein, and thus soon will be moving on to the next authors in the alphabet.  Along the way I’ve discovered some Heinlein art here and there that I didn’t realize I had in certain magazines, and I’ve picked up some more as well...like this nice Fred Ludekens from The Saturday Evening Post.  Now all 825 of these separate images of Heinlein art have been posted to the various pages of Heinlein galleries.

Enjoy!

Rafeeq

As I work slowly, so slowly through my library cataloging project, I’ve found a few holes in my Heinlein collection that I wanted to fill...so I did.

I have some interesting things still on the way, but already I’ve received the April-May 1953 issue of Astonishing Stories with “Project Nightmare,” the January and March 1963 issues of F&SF with the last two installments of Podkayne of Mars I was lacking, and, the September through December issues of Boys’ Life with The Rolling Stones serialized as Tramp Space Ship with illustrations by someone named Hal Sherman.

Oh, yes—and I picked up some cool old things that I posted to my “Science Fiction/Science Fact” area as well, including some beautiful art by Chesley Bonestell.

In any event, the Heinlein stuff of course now is posted to to the “Pulp Magazines” and “Serialized Novels” pages as appropriate.

Enjoy!

​Rafeeq

Leigh Brackett’s “The Beast-Jewel of Mars” is a neat story about using a sort of reverse-evolution regression as illicit entertainment or drug.  I had read it in a collection I picked up a year or two ago, but recently I found a copy of the 1942 Planet Stories that originally published the story.  I liked the story, and the flashy 1940s cover was so great that I figured I had to get it.

I opened up a new page in my Other SF Art galleries, specifically Pulp Magazines, so now I have a place to post the illustration at left.

Enjoy!

Rafeeq