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Your narrator, the Leader
The Leader attended Pulpfest in Cranberry, Pennsylvania slightly north of Pittsburg, 15 - 17 August 2019. He enjoys seeing the pulp magazine and paperback original art, old pulps and hardcover and paperback rare books that are not found at the regular comic book conventions he usually attends. The Leader enjoyed seeing his dealer friends from past Pulpfests incluing Gene Carpenter, Craig Poole, Brendan Faulkner, Mark Hickman, Wyatt Doyle, Ray Walsh also show promoters Mike Chomko and Jack Cullers who run this wonderful show. As usual the Leader enjoyed his annual trip with Gene Carpenter to the secret ice cream parlor nearby. The Leader was especially delighted with his late night bull sessions in the Double Tree hotel lobby with Wyatt Doyle and his friends Eric and Innes where all manner of subjects pertaining to popular culture were discussed. The Leader's only slight disappointment was his and Gene's inablity to visit the giant flying saucer display in the nearby town of Mars. But the Leader, always undaunted, will try again next year.

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Saturday, 17 August 2019
The Meteor House Men
Mike Croteau, Win Scott Eckert, Paul Spiteri
Meteor House is a speciality publishing company that preserves and reprints the short stories and novels of the famous science fiction writer Philip Jose Farmer. Some of its members also write new novels based on characters created by Farmer or other authors’ characters that Farmer wrote novels about like Tarzan and Doc Savage. I see the Meteor House main players shown here at Pulpfest each year where they have their new Farmer related books for sale. At far right is their newest book Greatheart Silver And Other Pulp Heroes. At left is the leather bound lettered edition of a book they were previewing at last year’s show The Philip Jose Farmer Centennial Collection.
Tim Paxton
Tim Paxton of Grand Rapids, Michigan is another rare book dealer I see each year. This year he had two glass display cases full of exotic hardcover science fiction and fantasy books shown here in addition to hundreds of science fiction paperbacks. Tim’s holding a first edition of Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain which was made into the 1971 movie.
Tim Paxton
Tim with an ultra rare when in nice shape paperback of the novelization of the 1959 movie Rio Bravo with stars John Wayne, Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson painted on the cover. The screenplay and this novelization were written by famous science fiction writer Leigh Brackett. This book in average condition on ebay is about $50. Tim’s asking $150 for this high grade copy. The only other copy I’ve ever seen of this book was several years ago when I bought a storeroom of thousands of paperbacks in Richmond, Virginia and there was one copy there. Sadly for me, I had to give it to my John Wayne collector friend Jack Price for helping me to load and transport the paperbacks.
Craig Poole
Original science fiction book and magazine cover art collector and dealer Craig Poole of Richmond, Virginia had by far the most spectacular display of original art this year’s show like he does most years at Pulpfest. Craig specializes in collecting for himself Ace Double paperback covers and he liked my Ace Double D-Series T-shirt I was wearing to Pulpfest this year. He wanted to buy one but I explained I only had the one I was wearing and he was a little hesitant so far to commit to paying the $50 for just one shirt to be made just for him. I think he will come around by next year’s Pulpfest however.
Craig Poole
The famous novel by Oscar Wilde The Picture Of Dorian Gray was first published in 1890. It has been reprinted many times in hardcover and paperback and made into several movies starting with the MGM version in 1945. Here’s Craig with the original art to the cover of one of the many paperback book editions.
Speaking of original art to paperback covers, for me the holy grail of science fiction paperback covers is the early 1960s Ace Books paperback edition of City written by Clifford D. Simak. The cover is illustrated by noted artist Ed Valigursky and shows the robot Jenkins operating a control board with a city in ruins behind him. I asked Craig about this and it turns out tragically for me that somebody else with deeper pockets than me also considers this a holy grail cover. Craig told me he knows the guy who has it but the guy is a Valigursky fan and robot fan and is also rich and doesn’t need money and has no intention of ever selling it.
Mark Hickman
Mark Hickman showing an original pencil sketch by famous DC comic book artist Murphy Anderson. He also has a nice high grade paperback of one of Philip Joe Farmer’s science fiction novels. Mark’s father Lyn Hickman was one of the original founders of Pulpcon in the early 1970s which is now known as Pulpfest.
Ray Walsh
Ray Walsh of the Curous Book Shop in Lansing, Michigan attends this show each year and always has one of the largest selections of science fiction pulps for sale. He usually has one or two nice science fiction original paintings but this year all he had was an original painting from a Western pulp cover. Let’s wait and see what he has next year.
Ray Walsh
Astounding Science Fiction was the most important pulp magazine from a literary perspective from 1937 up through the early 1950s. Under the editorship of the famous John W. Campbell starting in 1937 all the big name science fiction writers had stories published in newly named Astounding Science Fiction. In the early 1950s competitors like Galaxy and The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction diminished Astounding’s near lock on the best writers but Astounding remained a major player even still with plenty of good writers. Leave it to Ray to have enough issues of Astounding available to put together for us here a nearly complete history of the magazine’s many size format and name changes through the years. The early 1930s pre-Cambellian Astounding Stories issue with the gorilla holding the man is a sample of a regular size pulp like any other pulp in the 1920s and 1930s; it just looks large here becaue of the wide angle lens I'm using. Moving from right to left we see that Astounding switched to a larger “bedsheet” size in 1942 an example of which is shown here with the issue with the “Lunar Landing” cover blurb. In 1943 the magazine switched back to regular pulp size for only six issues which Ray didn’t have a sample of. In late 1943 Astounding switched to the smaller digest size as shown with the issue with the “Giant Killer” cover blurb. Astounding remained digest size through the rest of the 1940s up to today with one exception. The exception was Analog went to an oversize magazine format for about two years in the mid 1960s until changing back to digest size. Where did Analog come from? In 1960 Astounding Science Fiction began fiddling with different confusing name changes and ended up in late 1960 with Analog Science Fiction & Fact and later just Analog. That’s still the name of the digest magazine today. Ray is holding a sample issue of the mid 1960s Analog oversize magazine format. This two year run of oversize Analog issues still had the mostly mundane covers Astounding was always noted for but it still had some of the the top writers. For instance, a few of these oversize Analog issues contained the original magazine serialization of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune. Whew! Aren't you glad we're not having a quiz on this?
Wyatt Doyle
Wyatt showing off his and partner Bob Deis’s many books on Men’s Adventure magazines. Their newest book is Eva - Men’s Adventure Supermodel which Wyatt was kind enough to give me for certain services rendered. Let’s taker a closer look at this book in the next two photo at right and below.
Wyatt Doyle
Eva Lynd was a Swedish “illustration model” who worked in America in the 1950s and 1960s. Illustration models posed for photographers and artists who then used the photos as reference to paint magazine and paperback covers. In Eva’s case she worked a lot with a cover artist named Al Rossi who took his own reference photos which he then used to paint the paperback or magazine covers. Here’s some photos of Eva posing and the paperback book covers the photos were turned in to. The photo at left show Eva posing with a male model she often worked with, Steve Holland who posed for hundreds of illustrations that appeared in Men’s Adventure magazines. I’ve sold dozens of Men’s Adventure magazines on ebay over the last 20 years and I sometimes thought that the hunky heroic guys on the cover and inside illustrations frequently looked similar to each other. Now I know why.
Wyatt Doyle
Here’s another photo of Eva Lynd posing for photographer Al Rossi and the completed sleazy illustration for a typical Men’s Adventure magazine the photo was used as reference for. Eva has a brief Internet Movie Database (IMDb) entry that lists her few movie and TV credits but the listing says nothing about her far more extensive career as an illustration model.
Nicholas Parisi
It’s late Saturday afternoon and activity in the dealer’s room was winding down. I had enjoyed Nicholas Parisi’s Friday night presentation on The Twilight Zone and I wanted to buy his book so I hurried over to his table and took my last photo for Pulpfest 2019. I mentioned to Mr. Parisi that I had been asking another Twilight Zone book author, Martin Grams, Jr. about bringing to DVD a Bob Hope Chrysler Theater 1964 episode written by Rod Serling named “Slow Fade To Black” starring Rod Steiger and Robert Culp as movie studio executives. I saw it on TV in the 1970s and hadn’t seen it since. Marty’s been telling me for two years that he knows a cranky old man who supposedly owns a 16mm print of this episode but he won’t lend it to Marty to burn off a DVD. Turns out Mr. Parisi knows Marty and is attending Marty’s Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Con in September as I will. Mr. Parisi said he would speak with Marty about the problem and see what they could do about it.
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