I need to spend less time on eBay. A few weeks ago, I stumbled on a collector selling significant lots of vintage fanzines and critical journals from the 70s and 80s — things like Science Fiction Review, The Alien Critic, Fantasy Review, SF Collector, Fantasy, and others. Hard-to-find-stuff, as I later told my wife Alice, trying to explain why the postman had delivered a 16-pound package and why we were out over two-hundred bucks. So now I’m in the doghouse. But…
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Yesterday, I spent the day at the Spring Auction at Games Plus, which I’ve taken to calling the Paris Fashion Week of Games. It was a very successful outing — so successful that I knew I had some explaining to do to Alice, who balances the family finances. While I was waiting to settle up with the cashier, my eyes fell on a curious artifact in the tiny books section at Games Plus: The Merriest Knight, The Collected Arthurian Tales of…
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I’ve been neglecting Galaxy magazine in my recent Vintage Treasures articles. I’ve covered some of the great fiction in Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Worlds of If, but the truth is that Galaxy was on its last legs by the time I started reading science fiction and fantasy in 1976, and it folded in 1979. But I’m not wholly ignorant of the contribution Galaxy made to the field, especially under the editorship of H.L. Gold (1950 – 1961) and Frederik…
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This week sees some great bargains on fantasy, dark fantasy and horror from Carroll & Graf, including several of their splendid Mammoth Book Of… anthologies such as Mike Ashley’s The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy, and a fine collection from Stephen Jones covering Dracula, Wolf Men, Monsters, and more. These are sizable trade paperbacks, 500 pages or more, and they assemble a wide assortment of excellent short fantasy. For those looking for something a little edgier, or at least more in…
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Newcomers to fantasy collecting may be unaware of the scope of pertinent and very useful information on the web, and particulary the resources assembled by members of the Yahoo Fictionmags Group. The terms “Big List,” “FMI,” “Galactic Central,” “Locus Index” and many others crop up without necessarily being understood. Fictionmags includes the authors of some of the most seminal and definitive reference works on magazine Science Fiction, Fantasy, and General Fiction. Not only is this material substantial and providing of answers to many…
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SF author Bud Webster informs us that his book Anthopology 101: Reflections, Inspections and Dissections of SF Anthologies, is now available from The Merry Blacksmith Press. Bud tells us: Anthologies are the core samples of science fiction. Through their pages, we can not only follow the growth of the genre from its very beginnings, but we can also study the past’s visions of the future. As author of the always-fascinating Past Masters column, which examines the forgotten work of some of…
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Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary, by Jane Frank McFarland Publishing Co (534 pages, $148.00, February 2009) My initial interest in amassing my collection of SF & Fantasy magazines began with the appeal of the cover art. I jumped on Robert Weinberg’s Biographical Dictionary of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists when it was published in 1988. This work has been virtually alone since then as a definitive coverage of the lives and work of most…
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Last night at dinner we were discussing (as one does) Homer Eon Flint. Since my guests were working on ideas for the 2011 Potlatch convention, we can be forgiven this. Flint was a local author, having grown up in San Jose, and there was talk of doing a panel on him. I had not known that Flint was working in a shoe repair shop in SJ, or that he was killed in a car crash (perhaps after stealing it from a…
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Special Black Gate Feature by John R. Fultz All rights reserved. Copyright 2006 by New Epoch Press. When speaking of the world’s greatest writers of fantasy fiction, there is one name that continues to surface among the true experts, if not on the lips of the general public: Darrell Schweitzer. Most widely known as a long-time editor of the legendary Weird Tales magazine (along with George Scithers and John Betancourt), Schweitzer is a prolific fantasist whose mythopoeic stories and novels…
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Darrell Schweitzer is one of fantasy’s true renaissance men. As co-editor of Weird Tales he’s kept alive the field’s most venerated and historic magazine, while simultaneously helping guide and shape the next generation of fantasy authors. As a literary critic he’s illuminated the careers of many modern masters with his Discovering Modern Horror Fiction series, The Thomas Ligotti Reader, the upcoming Neil Gaiman Reader, and many other fine works. But it’s with his fiction that he’s made his most important…
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