Your narrator, the Leader

The Leader attended Pulpfest in Cranberry, Pennsylvania 19 - 22 August 2021. This show along with the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Con in Maryland are his two favorite shows but sadly the two shows had conflicting dates this year and the Leader had to forgo attending the Mid-Atlantic show. Three of the dealers the Leader enjoys seeing at Pulpfest, Gene Carpenter, Martin Grams, Brendan Faulkner all made the opposite decision and chose the Mid-Atlantic over Pulpfest to the Leader's mild chagrin. Still, the Leader enjoyed seeing his other dealer friends Mark Hickman, Ray Walsh, Joe Saines who always attend this show. The Leader was especially pleased to visit with his special Men's Adventure magazine dealer friends Bob Deis and Wyatt Doyle and their customer Eric Blackburn. A special surprise addition to the Men's Adventure coterie was Jacqueline Pollen who the Leader found enchanting. She is the widow of noted Mens Adventure magazine artist Sampson Pollen. The Leader, Wyatt, Eric and Ms. Pollen had a stimulating dinner at Max & Irma's restaurant where the Leader also satisfied his two year wait to consume that restaurant's famous Garbage Burger. The Leader also culminated another two year wait. At this show in 2019 he wanted to take his picture at the famous flying saucer in the nearby town of Mars but none of the local residents in Cranberry knew where it was. This year the Leader arrived early and sniffed out its location and took his long delayed photo. Another two year wait ended in failure however. Each year he and Gene Carpenter (who alone knows the location) visit the magical Secret Ice Cream Parlor. Before leaving for the show the Leader asked Gene the directions to the Secret Ice Cream Parlor. Gene's directions were to an ice cream store but the wrong one. Perhaps Gene wants the location to remain a secret.

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Saturday 21 August 2021

Doug Ellis Doug Ellis is a big player in the market for original science fiction and fantasy art and each year at Pulpfest he has the biggest display of such art. He also promotes the only pulp magazine and art show bigger than Pulpfest, the Windy City Pulp & Paperback Show in the Chicago area. I hope to make it to that show someday.	David M. Earle, Ph.D I first met David at the first Pulpfest I attended in Columbus, Ohio in 2015. He's an English professor from Pensacola, Florida and was selling a book he had just written, All Man, on the masculine virtues to be found in Men's Adventure magazines like Stag, For Men Only and so on. I saw him in passing at Pulpfest a few years ago but this is the first time he was set up as a dealer at Pulpfest since 2015. Here's David with a first edition paperback of the Frederic Brown mystery novel Night of the Jabberwock. Brown was a prominent short story writer in both science fiction and mystery. Jailbait Street, 1960 was written by Hal Ellson who specialized in novels about juvenile delinquency. A more famous author, Harlan Ellison, early in his career also wrote novels about juvenile delinquency and credited Ellson in jumpstarting his interest in the subject. Because of the similarity of subject matter and their names, the two authors are sometimes confused; Ellson is thought to be a pseudonym for Ellison and vice versa.	Bill Thade I first met comic book and pulp dealer Bill Thade at Pulfest in 2019 where he had some Spider-Man, Hulk and Doctor Strange posters for sale. This year he had a box of Weird Tales pulps which is considered by collectors to be the most collectible and expensive pulp title. The Weird Tales at left according to the cover blurb contains H.P. Lovecraft's last novel never before published - according to August W. Derleth. The Weird Tales at right has a cover illustrated by Matt Fox. Margaret Brundage is thought to be the best cover artist for Weird Tales but I think Matt Fox had a more bizarre and eye catching style. Fox drew some stories for Atlas (Marvel) Comics in the 1950s. In the early 1960s Marvel was still publishing fantasy and science fiction stories in titles like Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish. Some of the stories were drawn by editor Stan Lee's brother Larry Lieber who was a mediocre artist at best. However a few of Lieber's stories were inked by Matt Fox that made the art much better. Of course Matt Fox should have been chosen to draw and ink the entire story instead of just inking Lieber but I suppose Stan Lee thought blood was thicker than water.

Bob Deis & Wyatt Doyle I first met Bob and Wyatt at Pulpfest 2018 where they were set up selling their "Men's Adventure" magazines aka "men's sweat magazines". I knew about these magazines from being a magazine dealer myself but I never knew until then that several books had been published by Bob and Wyatt about these type of magazines. Bob moderates a website and Facebook group and Wyatt operates the New Texture publishing company. I had less after hours face-time with Bob and Wyatt this year because they were busy preparing their Eva Lynd evening presentation, but I enjoyed every minute I did have with them.

Bob Deis & Wyatt Doyle Bob and Wyatt with a softcover and hardcover copy of one of their latest books, Eva Men's Adventure Supermodel about TV actress and magazine figure model Eva Lynd. The reason you see so many sexy blondes in the pages of the Men's Adventure magazines and paperback books from the 1960s is because Eva posed for them.

Jacqueline Pollen The most pleasant surprise for me at this year's Pulpfest was getting to meet Jacqueline Pollen the widow of noted Men's Adventure magazine artist Sampson Pollen. She was very gracious and charming. Bob Deis and Wyatt Doyle have their fingers in every aspect of Men's Adventure magazines and on a tip from fellow aficionado Rich Oberg sometime ago they made contact with Ms. Pollen. This year they invited her to appear with them at Pulpfest. She agreed and drove out from New York City with some of her husband's original artwork to display and sell. All or most of the art you see here was for interior illustrations, not magazine covers. Ms. Pollen told us that the magazine editors and art directors had strict rules their cover artists had to follow and her husband preferred to do mostly interior illustrations since it gave him more artistic freedom. Much more of Sampson Pollen's original art will be for sale later this year through Heritage Auctions.

Jacqueline Pollen Ms. Pollen with the book Bob and Wyatt did about her husband's art a few years ago. I usually don't like to buy books with a landscape format instead of the usual portrait format since they look awkward on your bookshelves. But I was happy to make an exception in this case. I bought this wonderful book and of course got Bob, Wyatt and Ms. Pollen to sign it for me.

Michael Brenner Mike Brenner of Brenner's Collectable Books always has a large selection of rare hardcover and paperback books pertaining to science fiction and fantasy. Here's Mike with the first paperback edition of prolific fantasy author Abraham Merritt's The Ship Of Ishtar, 1946 and the first hardcover edition with a nice condition dust jacket from 1926. All of Merritt's books have gone through many paperback editions with different cover art. For my money the best and most outlandish paperback of The Ship Of Ishtar is the Avon Books edition from 1951.	Joseph Saine Joe Saine specializes in military toy soldiers but also has some rare books of interest every year at Pulpfest. I was delighted to see this book Joe had with him this year at Pulfpest: Horror Comics Of The 1950s, 1971 by Nostalgia Press. As a kid in the late 1960s I first saw this book advertised in the comic book fanzine Rocket's Blast Comicollector. I was just becoming aware of and starting to collect EC Comics and knew what the book was about but $19.95 was a lot of money back then and I never ordered it. Strangely, I never saw it at any of the dozens of comic book conventions I've attended over the last 50 years. And then finally Joe pops up with this copy with a decent condition dustjacket at Pulpfest. Suffice it to say the book has a new owner now.	Joseph Saine You aren't likely to see the insides of this book without spending a lot of money so here is what the front endpapers and inside dustjacket flap look like.

Joseph Saine Here's Joe with more interesting stuff. Understudy For Love,1961 is a rare sleaze paperback by famous crime writer Charles Willeford. Willeford's most popular book is probably The Woman Chaser, 1960. It would be fun to collect these type of sleazy paperbacks but the high grade copies frequently range around $200 and I just can't manage it. Joe also had a few pieces of original Humorama art by the top Humorama artist Bill Ward. Humorama is the name for a division of Martin Goodman publishing empire which included Marvel Comics and many Men's Adventure magazines. The Humoramas were digest size magazines with sexy photos and cartoon art by Bill Ward, Bill Wenzel, Dan DeCarlo and many others. Humorama art isn't too difficult to find. According to the collector show grapevine about 20 years ago Goodman's brother Abe who ran the Humorama division went through a divorce and he dumped the large stash of Humorama original art on the market to raise money for his wife's settlement.	Tim Paxton Tim Paxton is another of those Pulpfest dealers who has a knack for finding really rare and esoteric books. Here's Tim with the first paperback edition of The Killer Inside Me, 1952 by a crime writer more famous than Charles Willeford - Jim Thompson. I was living in San Bernardino, California in the 1980s and one day The Los Angeles Times ran a feature article on Jim Thompson. I knew who Thompson was from reading the commentaries by modern day crime writer Max Allan Collins for the hardcover reprint books Crime SuspensStories in the Complete EC Library series of books. The newspaper article piqued my interest and so I called several used and rare bookstores in Los Angeles to see if they had any Thompson books. Trouble was the newspaper article piqued a lot of people's interest and all the book stores I called were already sold out. I do have two Jim Thompson hardcover anthologies that I bought in that time period so it must have been after the furor died down. You can find other copies of The Killer Inside Me but good luck finding a copy of Tim's other book shown here, The Revenge Of Frankenstein, 1958 from Great Britain based on one of the Hammer film studio's Frankenstein movies starring Peter Cushing.	Martin J. Swiatkowski Martin Swiatkowski isn't a dealer but like me he is a devoted comic book and popular culture collector and I enjoy talking with him each year at Pulpfest. Late Saturday afternoon Martin showed me some of his new acquisitions. He was glad to get this rare Charlton comic book Racket Squad In Action #12, 1954 with the classic (and expensive) Steve Ditko cover. Sadly, this issue doesn't have a Ditko story. The #11 cover does have an early Ditko story and cover but the cover isn't as dynamic as the #12. Martin also liked this issue of the pulp magazine Air Stories which he said was highly unusual since it featured space ships instead of the usual 20th Century aircraft. The Warren Publishing magazine The Mole People, 1964 isn't rare. This magazine and a similar Warren magazine Horror Of Beach Party were in the Warren warehouse and not to hard to find. The original painting over Tim's right shoulder hanging on Doug Ellis's display rack is by the famous 1950s and 1960s science fiction artist Ed Emshwiller.

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