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Spaceways, v. 3, issue 6, whole no. 22, August 1941
5
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S P A C E W A Y S A COLLECTOR SPEAKS There would be the "Utopia" stories, the famous scientific fiction novels by Campbell and Smith, certainly "different" from anything ever written before and yet close to the readers' idea of real scientific fiction, and such tales as Weinbaum was writing--"A Martian Odyssey"--definitely apart from anything ever read before and relieving with their light touch. It's a pity that so very few authors wrote stories for the stf. magazines in such a delightfully humorous way as Weinbaum started out to. I would go into a very enthusiastic search after this or that author's work, discovering other stories I found to be very much worth reading meanwhile. Excerpting from the magazines was an allied hobby and carried to fantastic lengths. I would, for example, buy a dozen or so Astoundings in order to get "The Mightiest Machine" and "The Skylark of Valeron" complete, disposing of the remnants of the issues, only to buy later duplicated of the same magazines when I found how really good other stories in the same issues were, or overlapping serials such as "The Legion of Space". One serial alone, "Triplanetary", I must have bought four times. I paid 75c for an issue of Weird Tales containing a four-page fantasy story I wanted ("The White Ship", by Lovecraft), which was the only thing in the issue I cared to keep and excerpted. This is but one instance of many similar. To encourage me, almost every day there was a "find" of some sort or other. Please remember that at this time I was a boy of about fourteen with only a limited amount of spending money and appreciated to the full such incidents as the purchase of an Amazing Quarterly containing Coblentz's "After 12,000 Years" and Weird Tales of 1928 and 1929 vintage for five cents apiece, including rarer issues occasionally found such as the July, 1926 issue of Amazing which is the first of the earliest Amazings I found. With the discovering of scientific fiction in other periodicals besides those devoted to it and finding, almost simultaneously, Fantasy Magazine and its "Service Department" of out-of-the-way stf., it was inevitable that I acquired the urge to track down, if possible, every bit of scientific fiction ever published, if no more than to list each story under its own classification. This was the conscious awareness of the bibliographical trend of mind that I spoke of, later resulting in the issues of The Fantasy Collector and installments of "The Fantasy Record" already published--which, however, are but small fragments of what really should be undertaken with time, in some ideal descriptive fashion. It was then that I started out after the "out of the way" scientific fiction, genuinely interested, discovering the stf. in Agosy, Blue Book, Top Notch, and scores of other magazines. On just these alone I could go on for reams of pages, but I see that this article will be long enough just in talking about a couple of items. There were publications mentioned in the readers' departments that seemed non-existent no matter how hard I tried to get them, and, similarly, stories. It appeared as if no one oculd tell me anything about them, neither correspondents nor dealers whom I had at this time contacted to aid my various scientific fictional quests. And since fanzines only added fire to my curiosity to learn about the hard-to-get items, they grew to be legendary and things of mythical dream. These included a multitude of items, books, magazines, and stories. Chief among them were The Recluse, The Thrill Book, early Weird Tales, The Black Cat, and such classically-titled and famous stories as "The Blind Spot", "Palos fo the Dog-Star Pack", "Darkness and Dawn", and "The Conquest of Mars". Through my luck in contacting Elmer Weinman, a veteran scientific fiction collector-dealer just four blocks away from my home, it was practically simultaneous with my desire that I came to read the above-mentioned stories, with the exception of "Conquest of Mars", and to discover an almost complete set of Weird Tales which was completed several years later. In an inspired collaboration of collecting we set out on searches among bookstores in Buffalo as well, which resulted in a rapidly growing collection of my own including all the Argosy, All-Story, fantastic fiction I had ever dreamed about.
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S P A C E W A Y S A COLLECTOR SPEAKS There would be the "Utopia" stories, the famous scientific fiction novels by Campbell and Smith, certainly "different" from anything ever written before and yet close to the readers' idea of real scientific fiction, and such tales as Weinbaum was writing--"A Martian Odyssey"--definitely apart from anything ever read before and relieving with their light touch. It's a pity that so very few authors wrote stories for the stf. magazines in such a delightfully humorous way as Weinbaum started out to. I would go into a very enthusiastic search after this or that author's work, discovering other stories I found to be very much worth reading meanwhile. Excerpting from the magazines was an allied hobby and carried to fantastic lengths. I would, for example, buy a dozen or so Astoundings in order to get "The Mightiest Machine" and "The Skylark of Valeron" complete, disposing of the remnants of the issues, only to buy later duplicated of the same magazines when I found how really good other stories in the same issues were, or overlapping serials such as "The Legion of Space". One serial alone, "Triplanetary", I must have bought four times. I paid 75c for an issue of Weird Tales containing a four-page fantasy story I wanted ("The White Ship", by Lovecraft), which was the only thing in the issue I cared to keep and excerpted. This is but one instance of many similar. To encourage me, almost every day there was a "find" of some sort or other. Please remember that at this time I was a boy of about fourteen with only a limited amount of spending money and appreciated to the full such incidents as the purchase of an Amazing Quarterly containing Coblentz's "After 12,000 Years" and Weird Tales of 1928 and 1929 vintage for five cents apiece, including rarer issues occasionally found such as the July, 1926 issue of Amazing which is the first of the earliest Amazings I found. With the discovering of scientific fiction in other periodicals besides those devoted to it and finding, almost simultaneously, Fantasy Magazine and its "Service Department" of out-of-the-way stf., it was inevitable that I acquired the urge to track down, if possible, every bit of scientific fiction ever published, if no more than to list each story under its own classification. This was the conscious awareness of the bibliographical trend of mind that I spoke of, later resulting in the issues of The Fantasy Collector and installments of "The Fantasy Record" already published--which, however, are but small fragments of what really should be undertaken with time, in some ideal descriptive fashion. It was then that I started out after the "out of the way" scientific fiction, genuinely interested, discovering the stf. in Agosy, Blue Book, Top Notch, and scores of other magazines. On just these alone I could go on for reams of pages, but I see that this article will be long enough just in talking about a couple of items. There were publications mentioned in the readers' departments that seemed non-existent no matter how hard I tried to get them, and, similarly, stories. It appeared as if no one oculd tell me anything about them, neither correspondents nor dealers whom I had at this time contacted to aid my various scientific fictional quests. And since fanzines only added fire to my curiosity to learn about the hard-to-get items, they grew to be legendary and things of mythical dream. These included a multitude of items, books, magazines, and stories. Chief among them were The Recluse, The Thrill Book, early Weird Tales, The Black Cat, and such classically-titled and famous stories as "The Blind Spot", "Palos fo the Dog-Star Pack", "Darkness and Dawn", and "The Conquest of Mars". Through my luck in contacting Elmer Weinman, a veteran scientific fiction collector-dealer just four blocks away from my home, it was practically simultaneous with my desire that I came to read the above-mentioned stories, with the exception of "Conquest of Mars", and to discover an almost complete set of Weird Tales which was completed several years later. In an inspired collaboration of collecting we set out on searches among bookstores in Buffalo as well, which resulted in a rapidly growing collection of my own including all the Argosy, All-Story, fantastic fiction I had ever dreamed about.
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