Imagine my surprise a little while ago, when poking around Curious Books in East Lansing, suddenly to run across three nice old copies of the beautiful pulp Unknown containing early Heinlein stories: “Magic, Inc.,” “They,” and “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.”  Ah, what a find!

Unknown is a huge magazine, by the way, a bit bigger than a 9.5x11-inch sheet of paper, and they are richly illustrated—“They” has only one drawing, but it is absolutely perfect, while “Hoag” has a whopping 10 drawings!

I also picked up “Sky Lift”—cover pictured here—plus the first half of “Gulf” and yet another variation of the Darrell K. Sweet cover of The Star Beast.  I had passed on that extra Sweet on another couple of earlier trips, actually, but I finally caved, since this red-background version indeed is an interesting change from the green-background example I already had...

In any event, all now are scanned and thence posted in my Heinlein cover art galleries.

Enjoy!

Rafeeq

A while ago I picked up some more goodies at Curious Books: the May 1941 Astounding with “Universe,” plus a very nice first edition hardcover of Friday.  Also, in looking over some stuff, I belatedly realized that “ ‘—We Also Walk Dogs’,” under the Anson MacDonald pseudonym, is in the July 1941 issue, which I already had...  It was time, therefore, for some scanning, wasn’t it?  I did so, and now that pristine Friday is cataloged on the “Later Works” page, while the others are in “Pulp Magazines.”

Enjoy!

Rafeeq

Well, I went to Curious Books in East Lansing again, and I ended up picking up a few more nice old Heinlein pulps from 1941...  After scanning them—and not even yet getting to the interior art of “Methuselah’s Children,” come to think of it—I suddenly realized that I had a full fifty pics.  Rather than keep them in the “Early Works” page, therefore, I finally broke down and created a new page solely for them: “Pulp Magazines.”

I am so happy to have these in my collection, and I hope that you, too, you may enjoy their art posted here.

Rafeeq

Yesterday I stopped into Curious Books in East Lansing and picked up a couple Heinlein editions whose covers were new to me, including a British Number of the Beast with wonderfully splashy mid-80s art that has absolutely zero to do with the plot.

Most importantly, however, I happened to take a look at their pulps, which included some niiiiiiice stuff...

For example, imagine my surprise in prowling through the shelves of Astounding to find the August 1939 issue containing “Life-Line,” Heinlein’s first published story—wow!  I guess I never imagined I would hold one of these in my hands, but apparently they have not all been snapped up by collectors, and do still exist in shops here and there.  Well, not this one anymore, of course...

In any event, I also chanced to grab “Misfit,” “Requiem,”  “ ‘If This Goes On—’,” “The Roads Must Roll,” “Coventry,” and “Blowups Happen.”  For a Heinlein aficionado, these are some of the true holies.

I scanned each lovely cover, therefore, plus, with care, their nifty pen-and-ink interiors, too, and now all are in my Heinlein cover art galleries.

Enjoy!

It was a lovely day in mid-Michigan, so I went over to the always-delightful Curious Books in East Lansing, where I found another seven copies of various Heinlein that I wanted.  And then as I was checking out, the clerk, noticing the trend of the pruchases, pointed out a British Space Family Stone (i.e., The Rolling Stones) with a lovely science-fictional cover of speedboating on a wild alien world--the art has nothing to do with the plot, of course, but for a couple more bucks, I couldn't resist.  All covers now are scanned to the appropriate pages of my Heinlein cover art galleries.

Enjoy,

Rafeeq

The 90% discount sale for the sensual, poignant drama Student Body begins at 9:00am Pacific on Monday, September 15th, with the $9.99 Kindle edition available for only 99 cents!  The price will increase a dollar a day thereafter, with the sale ending Monday the 21st.

Charming young professor-to-be Rick O’Donnell seems to have it all, but he also hides a desperate secret: his brief, passionate affair with a beautiful girl who had been his own student just the semester before, and who now is a fellow teaching assistant with an office right down the hall from his.  If the truth comes out, he will lose everything—his once-promising career, his marriage, perhaps even his life.  This novel is the frank and intimate tale of a harrowing week and a half which will decide a deeply conflicted man’s entire future…and the lives of the women who love him.

Hailed as “vivid” and “emotional,” “smoothly presented” and “carefully crafted,” with an “unexpected conclusion…both believable and satisfying,” Student Body on September 15th at last can be downloaded for your enjoyment at deep discount: http://www.amazon.com/Student-Body-Rafeeq-O-McGiveron-ebook/dp/B00IICK44Y/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1410640161.

Well, I had had Philip K. Dick’s Confessions of a Crap Artist sitting on the shelf, picked up at Curious Books in East Lansing a few months ago, and while I had read all of Dick s other works back in the late ’80s and ’90s, it was only a few days ago that I finally got around to reading this one—intriguing and enjoyable, and, really, it rather whets the palate for going back and rereading all the other works sometime...

In any event, I did a quick review on Goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/985909012?book_show_action=false, so here ’tis.

Rafeeq


Deeply intriguing, sometimes puzzling, definitely worth the read. Point of view is interesting, varying among first person with Jack, and third person limited with either Fay or Charley or Nat. Toward the end Jack comments on the various levels of irony in the title of his book--is he presumed to have written all other chapters as well, rather than there being an omniscient author who compiled everything? Maybe, maybe not, though the lurid pulp-style "dramatization" of the affair of Fay and Nat which he presents to Charley in the hospital makes me wonder.

And I wonder about a few loose ends, too. In one chapter, for example, Jack says that his parents burned his comic book collection during the war while he was fighting on Okinawa, while later Fay notes, perhaps a bit derisively, that he was in the service only a few months--what exactly is the truth here? Or what of Jack's early mention of his interest in, essentially, bondage or fetish erotica, which never seems to come back, unless it is with the faint echo of the lurid pulps he imitates? How much does Jack really know, and who is kidding whom? Such questions, perhaps, are part of the novel's appeal.

4 July 2014

This afternoon I stopped into Curious Books in East Lansing and picked up a UK paperback of The Cat Who Walks through Walls plus the first of three installments of Podkayne of Mars in the November 1962 Worlds of If, illustrated by Virgil Finlay.  I have posted the cover art of both novel and magazine, plus the two interiors by Finlay, to their appropriate places in my Heinlein galleries.

Enjoy,

Rafeeq

Stopped off at Curious Books in East Lansing today and picked up some old Hal Clement and L. Sprague de Camp that I had heard of but not yet read, along with Philip K. Dick’s Confessions of a Crap Artist, which I also need to read.

More apropos to this post, however, I picked up 6 nifty new Heinlein covers.

Four are novels: another variation of Darrell K. Sweet’s The Star Beast, a Steele Savage Tunnel in the Sky, a stylized British book club edition of The Door into Summer, and an uncredited The Moon is a Harsh Mistress that appears to be by the same artist who did a number of Heinlein covers for Berkley in the late ’60s.

Perhaps most enjoyably, I got both Ed Emshwiller covers for Starship Soldier, which is how Starship Troopers was serialized in F&SF.  The October ’59 cover does not specifically depict Heinlein’s piece, but, as seen above, the November one sure does!

Enjoy,

Rafeeq

Today at Curious Books in East Lansing I picked up 28 more Heinlein books for my cover art galleries—28!  They took quite a while to scan.  They took quite a while to post on the site.  And they're going to take quite a while to shelve, as everything from "H" on down will have to move about 20 inches to the right...  Still, I am really glad to get these, as they are a great mix of SF art old and new, including, among others, several rousing mid-1970s pieces from Darrell K. Sweet.

Enjoy,

Rafeeq