Plenty of rain around this month to drive me into second-hand bookshops, with some lovely finds.
The Hidden Planet, Donald A Wolheim (Ed), Ace Books, 1959.
£1.00, near mint condition, Zardoz Bookshop, Wiltshire.
Late fifties collection of science fiction short stories. Donald A. Wolfheim is a legend in science fiction publishing with Robert Silverberg suggesting he was “responsible in large measure for the development of the science fiction paperback and the science fiction anthology.” He was an editor at Avon books and then Ace (where he developed the Ace Doubles) and then went on to found DAW books. His Wikipedia page is definitely worth reading in full.
Love on the Dole, Walter Greenwood, Penguin Modern Classic, 1975 reprint.
£2.00, good condition, part of small eBay bundle.
Lovely cover on this mid-seventies Penguin Modern Classic. Penguin Modern Classics were introduced by then Penguin Chief Editor Tony Goodwin in 1961 with, from 1962, Germano Facetti designed covers based on the famous Marber Grid. Facetti wanted bright colours on the covers instead of the illustrations so he used images of paintings selected from museums and picture agencies. The pictures were generally chosen from the same period and social or historical context as the book itself, or in some way suggest or describe it. This cover comes from a 1919 Labour Party election poster. Perhaps appropriate as Labour has just won the General Election, but perhaps not as today’s Labour party is light years away from its early 20th Century origins.
The Female Man, Joanna Russ, The Women’s Press Science Fiction, 1983.
£1.99, Mint condition, Oxfam Salisbury.
I love these Women’s Press Science Fiction books published in the mid-late 1980s. I’ve got about a dozen or so and grab them whenever I see them. They have very distinctive grey spines and are usually in very good condition. I hadn’t read this before and found it a great story. Reminiscent of ‘Women on the Edge of Time’, a book that I read and loved in my early twenties (which was also published in this series but with the later black and white spine).
A Whiff of Death, Isaac Asimov, Sphere, 1970.
£3.00, very good condition, Oxfam Shaftesbury.
You never know where you will be led when you grab a book with a great cover off a charity bookshop shelf. I assumed, being written by Isaac Asimov, this would be science fiction. It turned out in fact to be crime fiction – originally published in 1958 in the US as The Death Dealers (a title Asimov didn’t appreciate, hence the new title when republished). The blurb on the back states that Asimov was “author of the famous S.F. crime stories.”. Something of an embellishment by the publishers there, as while he did write some crime short stories, as far as I know this is his only crime novel. Hunting round for more details on the net discovered, however, that it was made into an Iranian TV movie, Formula of Death, in 2012. Hats off for the great jacket, Sphere.
Vintage Paperback Treasure 