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 pickup!

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 about 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

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

Well, looks like I haven't blogged in, ahem, a while...but I actually have been doing a fair bit.  First, contrary to last year's statement about posting my Goodreads reviews here, I just decided to link 'em from the "Goodreads Reviews" page of my "Literary Criticism and Reviews" area.    I have put in quite a few over the last several months, including reviews on all titles in Edgar Rice Burroughs's eleven-book Barsoom series.

I found the original publication of Heinlein's "The Man Who Traveled in Elephants," which was titled "Elephant Circuit" when it first came out in the October 1957 Saturn Science Fiction and Fantasy.  I had read the story probably only once, a more than 30 years ago, so I re-read it in the original pulp, which was nice.  The cover art--apparently for a story called "California is Doomed!"--is crazily garish and now is posted on my "Pulp Magazines" page.

I also picked up early 1950s book reprints of Heinlein's semi-rarely-discussed "Water Is for Washing," one a hardcover with nifty cover art of a man and also a woman, both rifle-armed, moving through palm trees, and one a paperback with some rather interesting and casual ethnographic teaser blurbs on the back.  Now, I confess that the story's original publication in the November 1947 Argosy was something I had been looking for for a long time to no avail...and suddenly it turned up in a completely random venue.  Excellent.  The charming Peter Stevens double-page interior is here, but of course a fuller shot of it, along with the cover art and more, can be found at the good ol' "Pulp Magazines" page.

Enjoy!

Rafeeq

As July draweth to a close, I suddenly realize that the last month and a half has been pretty busy in terms of updates to my Heinlein cover art galleries.  In addition to new-to-me editions of books like Waldo and Magic, Inc., Orphans of the Sky, The Man Who Sold the Moon, Time for the Stars, and Podkayne of Mars, I also have come across quite a bit of things from magazines.

I picked up reprints of “Water is for Washing,” for example, a Heinlein review of a Willy Ley text in the July 1944 Astounding, an article in the 28 May 1949 Saturday Review of Literature that discusses Heinlein pretty prominently, “Tenderfoot in Space” serialized in Boys’ Life in 1958, a reprint of “Gentlemen, Be Seated,” “The Black Pits of Luna” in its original 1948 Saturday Evening Post, and “No Bands Playing” from the December 1973 Vertex.

And beyond these...  Well, at last I also acquired some rather rarely found things as well: “Cliff and the Calories” from the August 1950 Senior Prom, where in this girls’ magazine he is bylined only as “R. Heinlein”; “The Long Watch” in the December 1949 issue of the American Legion Magazine; and the extraordinarily elusive “My Object All Sublime,” published under the Lyle Monroe byline in the February 1942 issue of the peculiarly titled Future Combined with Science Fiction.  “My Object All Sublime,” by the way, is one of the early “stinkeroos” that was never, ever, ever reprinted until the big $1,500 leather-bound Virginia Edition of Heinlein’s complete works, and it was great to read it in the original nearly 80-year-old pulp.

Of all the aforementioned, I’m not sure whether  “Cliff and the Calories” or “My Object All Sublime” is rarest, but “The Long Watch,” originally released as “Rebellion on the Moon,” is perhaps my favorite.  This rousing and yet poignant tale of an upright young officer who receives a fatal dose of radiation while disobeying a direct order and thus preventing his superior from using deterrent rockets to stage a putsch that would enslave the world, with the youngster then sitting there calmly smoking his last cigarette before the chattering Geiger counter, thinking of his wife, and of his baby girl being able to grow up in freedom, while the patriots of American history gather close in the final moments of his watch, always literally gives me goosebumps.  This is the one I will picture now.

Rafeeq

Although a jillion copies of The Saturday Evening Post have been printed, it can be strangely difficult to find a 1947 or 1948 copy with certain Heinlein stories.  ​“The Black Pits of Luna” is one for which I had been keeping my eye peeled for quite some time, but I just never encountered one...until a couple days ago.

Shipping was astoundingly swift, and the magazine is good-looking.  Now the cover and the lovely Fred Ludekens interior painting both are scanned to the “Pulp Magazines” page of my “Heinlein Cover Art” galleries.

Enjoy!

​Rafeeq

Every now and then ​I’ll run across an auction with some realllllllly nice SF art, but the popular stuff always ends up being really pricey, doesn’t it?  I mean, when you see the original Frank R. Paul painting for “The Asteroid of Death” or one of the original Ed Emshwiller paintings for Have Space Suit—Will Travel when first serialized in F&SF...well, it’s gonna cost.  The bidding just goes up and up and up, and one can only watch with a vague longing.

Well, recently I came across the original Steele Savage painting that was used as the cover for the 1971 Ace printing of Heinlein’s 1956 Scribner’s juvie, Time for the Stars.  The piece is stylized and bold, as his work from that period tends to be, and it’s rather pretty in its own way.  I had a couple extra shekels in my pouch from that coronavirus stimulus check, and I really wanted to help out the economy by keeping everything in flow, so...win-win, especially when bidding wasn’t too deadly.

In any event, I finally received this nifty piece, and its image now is scanned to the “Scribner’s YA/Juveniles” page of my Heinlein cover art galleries.

Enjoy!

Rafeeq