Aaron's Book of the Week :: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Book of the Week is The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.

I used to do "Book of the Week" posts highlighting some of the volumes from my personal book collection, in which I take absurd pride. I ran out of gas (but I sure as hell didn't run out of books) about three years ago——click on the "Book of the Week" tag if you want to sample some of the old posts——but I felt compelled to resurrect the Book of the Week today, when I read that this is the 75th anniversary of the original release of The Hobbit.

As any regular reader of this blog (and pretty much everyone else) already knows, The Hobbit is one of the most beloved classics of modern fantasy, and its author J.R.R. Tolkien arguably the most important fantasist of the Twentieth Century. Sadly, I wasn't around in 1937 to pick up the first edition of The Hobbit, which now runs to tens of thousands of dollars on the collectors' market. But I'm pleased at least to have the first American paperback, published by Ballantine Books in 1965, cover art by Barbara Remington.

Note that this cover has very little to do with the story of The Hobbit——you will search the text in vain for any mention of the ostrich creatures or the goofy-looking lion that appear on the front of the book. Tolkien particularly disliked the lion, and at his request it was airbrushed out of later printings. Artist Barbara Remington had not yet read The Hobbit when she did the cover. This is not quite so irresponsible as it sounds; Ace Books had recently beaten Ballantine to the American market with unauthorized paperback editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Ballantine rushed The Hobbit to press so as to forestall another pirated Ace edition.

For the next Book of the Week entry, I'll show you the unauthorized Ace edition of The Fellowship of the Ring.

Aaron's Magazine of the Week :: G-8 and His Battle Aces June 1937

The Magazine of the Week is the June 1937 issue of G-8 and His Battle Aces, with cover story "Flight from the Grave" by prolific pulp author Robert J. Hogan. G-8 was an attempt to combine a hero pulp with a war pulp about World War I fighting aces. In order to include the amount of action and intrigue that hero pulp readers expected, G-8 resorted to some of the most bizarre story devices ever seen in the pulps or anywhere else. I love this cover image (by Frederick Blakeslee) of a vampire/zombie emerging from a coffin perched on top of a World War I biplane. Did he nail that thing to the fuselage the night before? Of all the absurd magazine covers that appeared in the pulp era, this one gets my vote as the most outrageous.

G-8 is remembered fondly by science fiction collectors for its wild elements of fantasy and horror. Many other hero pulps also had elements of science fiction and fantasy, particularly Doc Savage and The Secret 6, but there was only one hero pulp that was actually set in the future. You will see this futuristic hero in next week's Magazine of the Week.

Aaron's Magazine of the Week :: Weird Tales September 1937

The Magazine of the Week is the September 1937 issue of Weird Tales, with cover art by legendary pulp illustrator Margaret Brundage. Margaret Brundage was a Chicago housewife who delighted in pushing the limits of the time with her racy covers for Weird Tales. This particular cover illustrates the story "Satan's Palimpsest" by Seabury Quinn. Seabury Quinn was by no means the best of the Weird Tales authors (although his Jules de Grandin supernatural mystery stories were popular at the time), yet he consistently managed to get his stories on the cover. His secret? He made sure each of his stories had at least one nude scene.

During the 1930's, Weird Tales boasted a tremendous array of talented authors, including in particular Robert E. Howard, discussed last week, and hugely influential horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. The September 1937 issue is a good example of the wealth of talent writing for Weird Tales in the 1930's. In addition to Howard and Lovecraft, the issue includes work by such excellent authors as August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, and Henry Kuttner.

But from its peak in the mid- to late 1930's, Weird Tales suddenly went into a tailspin. The magazine remained in print through 1954 (and there have been several attempts to resurrect it since then), but Weird Tales never regained its form after the 1930's. The cause of the magazine's sudden decline was the untimely deaths of its editor and its two best writers. In 1936, depressed by his mother's illness, Robert E. Howard committed suicide at the age of only 30. H.P. Lovecraft died of cancer at 46 the next year, and Farnsworth Wright succumbed to Parkinson's disease in 1940. After their deaths, science fiction became the dominant form of fantastic literature, and fantasy and horror largely went into hibernation until J.R.R. Tolkien and Stephen King came along to resurrect the fields decades later. But how differently things might have gone if Howard and Lovecraft and Wright had lived.

Having surveyed the earliest science fiction and fantasy pulps, we will continue our history of the pulp magazines with some pulps outside of the SF/F genre. But first we'll take a break so I can boast of a couple recent book acquisitions.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: The Hampdenshire Wonder by J.D. Beresford

The Book of the Week is the first paperback edition (with dust jacket) of The Hampdenshire Wonder by J.D. Beresford. First published in hardback in 1911, The Hampdenshire Wonder is the story of a super-intelligent child. This was an important early treatment of the question of what the next phase of human evolution will be, yet has been neglected over the years, as Beresford never realized the fame of his contemporaries H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon (whose 1935 classic Odd John was influenced by The Hampdenshire Wonder).

This first paperback edition of The Hampdenshire Wonder was published by Penguin Books in 1937. It was among the first one hundred mass-market paperback books ever printed, all released in England by Penguin between 1935 and 1937, all before Penguin's American counterpart Pocket Books got into the act in 1938. By my reckoning, The Hampdenshire Wonder was the first science fiction book ever published in mass-market paperback. Like all early Penguin paperbacks, The Hampdenshire Wonder lacks cover art, but makes up for that with its dust jacket. Dust jackets on paperback books are a rarity, and vintage paperbacks with intact dust jackets are always collectible.

Penguin and Pocket began to create the market for mass-market paperbacks in the late 1930's, and they took a few years to catch on. But that does not mean readers had to buy hardcover books before that. In fact, there was another inexpensive format available to readers, a format that dominated the fiction market for a half-century before being squeezed out in the 1940's and 50's by paperbacks (and comic books, for younger readers). You will see the first of many examples of that format next week.