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The Sci-Fi Guy has been a life long fan of literary science fiction. In recent years he has found a few collections of substantial science fiction pulps and paperback books. He first struck in 2015 by buying a large collection in Kingston, New York as shown here. Next, he struck again in 2016 by uncovering a large collection of hardcover and paperback books in Richmond, Virginia as chronicled here. Now he has struck again by buying a large collection of a few hundred digest magazines and a very small batch of paperbacks and hardbacks shown in the photo above. The digest magazines were mostly Galaxy and The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction. There was also a stack of regular magazine size Analog from the mid1960s. These were all bought from a lady in Washington state who was selling them for her husband. The Sci-Fi Guy bought this collection because the email photos he was sent showed the magazines to be clean and in much better than average condition. In July 2018 the Sci-Fi Guy attended the Pulpfest convention in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania where he bought 14 paperbacks and 10 Science Fiction Book Club hardcover books all from the same collection. The paperbacks were extremely high grade with clean glossy covers. Book Club editions aren’t near as valuable as regular editions but they were also in nice shape and only $1.00 each so the Sci-Fi Guy was happy to buy them. When will the Sci-Fi Guy strike next? Only time will tell.

The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction sometimes put out issues devoted to a single author. The author’s face was painted on the cover along with images from his stories. The famous science fiction authors shown here with the Sci-Fi Guy are from left to right: James Blish, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon. The Sci-Fi Guy laments the lack of existence of a special issue like these devoted to one of his favorite authors, Clifford D. Simak.	The Sci-Fi Guy is also a comic book fan and rates comic book artist Wally Wood as one of his favorite artists. Wood is best remembered for illustrating science fiction stories for EC Comics in the early 1950s. In the late 1950s Wood also lent his talent to drawing interior illustrations and a few covers for the digest magazine Galaxy. There may be more than these four covers shown here but if so far the Sci-Fi Guy hasn’t found them yet. More information about Wood’s work for Galaxy may be found in the recent book by Roger Hill, Wally Wood: Galaxy Art And Beyond.	Clifford D. Simak’s most famous novel is City, 1952. His second most famous novel is Way Station, 1964 which won the prestigious Hugo Award for Best Novel of the year. This novel was first serialized in two parts beginning in the June 1963 issue of Galaxy shown above with the name “Here Gather The Stars.” The story is about a Civil War veteran named Enoch Wallace whose farm is one of many ‘way stations’ used as temporary stopping points by aliens who travel around the galaxy by energy beams like the ones used in the TV show Star Trek. After Enoch Wallace agrees to let the aliens use his farm as a way station one of the aliens drops his human disguise to show Enoch what they really look like. This dramatic scene in the book is depicted here by artist Wally Wood.

It’s widely known among comic book and science fiction fans that the 1930s pulp magazine character Doc Savage served as an inspiration for the comic book character Superman. It’s not as well known that Philip Wylie’s hardcover novel Gladiator, 1930 also was another source of inspiration for Superman’s creator Jerry Siegel when he and artist Joe Shuster introduced Superman to the world Action Comics #1, 1938. Wylie’s superhuman character Hugo Danner had his own ‘fortress of solitude’ of sorts and referred to himself as “a man of iron” and so forth. Wylie was sure Siegel did some borrowing from Gladiator because he threatened to sue Siegel in 1940 for plagiarism. We know for a fact that Siegel read Gladiator because he reviewed it in a 1930s science fiction fanzine he published. I first saw this Avon paperback version of Gladiator from 1949 at the San Diego Comic Con in the early 1980s and the seller mentioned to me that Siegel “went ape” when he read Gladiator. So even way back in the 1980s comic book fans were aware of the connection. Out of curiosity I always wanted a paperback copy of this book and was delighted when this high grade glossy copy was offered for sale in a paperback book collection being sold at Pulpfest in July 2018 for $3.00 each. The San Diego dealer wanted a lot more than $3.00 for his average copy almost 40 years ago.	My interest in comic books started as early as 1959 and my interest in science fiction wasn’t far behind. In the early 1960s at White Bluff Elementary School in Savannah, Georgia I was poking around in the school library and this book, Across The Sea Of Stars caught my eye. I had never heard of its author Arthur C. Clarke or any other science fiction author but something told me I needed to read this. I’m pretty sure it's the first science fiction book I read. It has several Clarke short stories which I enjoyed and I was especially impressed with the novel Childhood’s End. That novel remained my favorite Clarke novel for about 50 years until I read Against The Fall Of Night a few years ago which supplanted it as my favorite Clarke novel. In all my years of scouring used bookstores I never came across a copy of this book that opened up the wonderful world of science fiction to me; so it was a pleasant surprise to have it pop up at Pulpfest last July for me to buy in high grade for $1.00. It’s only a Science Fiction Book Club edition but for $1.00 I’ll be glad to have it around until a more expensive regular edition comes available.	To most people this paperback anthology edition of Three Times Infinity, 1966 isn’t remarkable. But it resonates with me for sentimental reasons involving a certain science fiction cover artist. In the late 1960s I was visiting Globe Book Mart which was the only used bookstore in Savannah that carried old back issue comic books and science fiction paperbacks. I still remember the owner had a sign in his science fiction book section at the back of the store that read something like “Savannah's largest selection of science fiction paperbacks.” When I saw this book at the Globe one day I didn’t buy it but I was impressed by the psychedelic looking cover art. It isn’t signed by the artist and his name isn’t noted inside but over the years I kept noticing that many science fiction paperbacks in the 1960s had this same artistic style. Somewhere along the way I finally figured out who Richard Powers was.

The venerable science fiction pulp magazine Astounding Science Ficton changed over from regular pulp magazine size to the smaller digest size in the late 1940s like all the old 1920s and 1930s pulp magazines did. Later Astounding changed its name to Analog Science Fact-Science Fiction but it was still a digest. Then in the mid 1960s for several months Analog switched over to a regular magazine size which was a little larger than the old pulp size and much larger than all the other science fiction digests. It soon abandoned the larger size experiment and went back to digest size where it still is today. The most notable issues from the regular size magazine period are five issues which serialized a long novel by Frank Herbert shown here as “Prophet Of Dune” and “Dune World.” Above are two of the three issues which featured Dune on the cover. I don’t have the giant sand worm cover. Looking at these somewhat mundane covers that Analog has always been noted for, I can’t imagine lots of people wanting to read these issues. But somebody certainly liked the stories. When the novel was published in 1966 as Dune it won the Nebula Award and later the Hugo Award for best novel. It also became the best selling science fiction novel of all time. Not bad for a novel with mediocre magazine covers and a hardcover book that no mainstream book publisher wanted to touch. Dune had to be published by the Chilton Publishing Co. known only for its automotive magazines.	The novels Stranger In A Strange Land and Starship Troopers are Robert A. Heinlein’s best known novels to science fiction fans. Much of the general public has never heard of Robert Heinlein or don’t know much about him. Any vague familiarity about Heinlein that seeps into the awareness of the general public comes mostly from the successful 1997 big budget movie Starship Troopers. I read the book many years ago and saw the movie but I didn’t know the novel had first been serialized in these two issues from 1959 of The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction under the name Starship Soldier. The cover of the issue at right accurately shows the Earth soldiers flying around in their suits but doesn’t show the suits as heavily armored like in the novel. The movie did show the soldiers wearing at least lightly armored suits but to save on the budget the soldiers had to remain on the ground with no flying.	In the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s it was common for nearly all the science fiction pulps (notably excluding Astounding Science Fiction) to feature scantily clad sexy women on the cover to sell the magazine. But over the years literary science fiction matured and the digest magazines didn’t rely as heavily on sexy covers. When I was going through the dozens and dozens of The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction from the early 1950s through the early 1970s in this collection these are the only two covers I found that featured overtly sexy covers like in the old days.

If you only want to own one issue of a Galaxy digest magazine here is the one you want. It features a great wrap-around cover of the many famous science fiction authors attending the magazine's second birthday party. Also in attendance are science article writer Willy Ley, famous magazine cover artist Ed Emshwiller and the even more famous astronomical artist Chesley Bonestell. Any science fiction fan can pick out at least two or three of the authors here. If you need help with the rest of them please click on this link to a diagram that names everybody.