Have recently picked up some more great vintage books over the past week giving us another 2 boxes of Ace Doubles and a box or two of other vintage sci-fi/fantasy, horror and mystery. While there were plenty of great mid-range finds like old Ace Dean Koontz and Philip K. Dick titles, there were two exceptionally fun finds in the lot.
The first was a very early Harlequin title (#192), Swamp Willow, by Edwina Elroy. A very scarce title (only one rough looking copy Harlequin available online for $400 and an ex-library hard cover first for $900) of the fictitious “story of Holly Tanner and the five men who influenced her.” Flush with detailed accounts of waterfront life on the New Jersey coast in Tannertown (including sailor brawls and rum-running), this is one of the only novels to use the “shabby” Jersey coast as it’s setting. Managed to dig up the 1947 review from the NJ Red Bank Register (middle column, pg. 3) in which the locals seemed to find the book rather ”entertaining and enjoyable”. The copy we have is in very good shape with only a bit of rubbing at the edges, so it will be interesting to see what we can get for it.
The second fun find, while not nearly as pricey, is an early Arkham Sampler magazine from 1949 in fine shape. The Arkham Sampler was a quarterly fantasy and horror fiction magazine first published in Winter 1948. Edited by August Derleth and published by Arkham House, each issue had a print run of only 1,200 copies. This issue is especially great (at least to me) as it has a wonderful short story by Clark Ashton Smith entitled The Root of Ampoi.
Finally, while not part of the above mentioned collection recently acquired, we did pick up a great piece of early science fiction by Otto Willi Gail called By Rocket to the Moon from 1931. It’s one of the earliest science fiction tales of travel to the moon that was well researched and seemed plausible. As Bleiler put it in his book Science-Fiction: The Early Years, “… fairly realistic in its description of the first flight into space. Despite Atlantis and life on the moon, the author has very carefully used the best scientific and technological data of his day, and much of what he says seems very modern.”
The copy we picked up is even an advance reading copy no less, with a little tip in slip of paper from the publishing kindly asking that no reviews be published until the book is released April 25th, 1931.
Now back to more packing as our move looms ever closer…
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