Aaron's Book of the Week :: Night Bus by Samuel Hopkins Adams

The Book of the Week is Night Bus by Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871-1958), cover art by Sandor Klein. Night Bus was the basis for the 1934 Frank Capra film It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. It Happened One Night was the first movie ever to sweep the Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress. (Only two other movies have done it since - can you name them?)

In addition to writing fiction such as Night Bus, Samuel Hopkins Adams was a muckraking journalist, whose series of articles exposing fraudulent medicines was instrumental in bringing about the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906. (Which I discovered when I googled him to write this - even I am learning interesting things from these Book of the Week entries.)

Originally published in Cosmopolitan magazine (a "slick" magazine even then, not one of the pulps), Night Bus was reprinted as #3 in Dell Books' series of 10¢ books published in 1951. These books were undersized and contained a single short story, reproducing the "dime novel" format that was successful in the Nineteenth Century but had completely disappeared a generation before the Dell 10¢ books, or "Dell Dimers," came along. The Dell Dimers were not a commercial success and disappeared after just 36 titles. These unusual books are now quite hard to find, and a few are very rare. Among the most rare Dell Dimers is next week's Book of the Week, the only science fiction title in the series.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road by Edward L. Wheeler

Most of you have heard the phrase, "You sound like a dime novel," but how many of you have ever seen a dime novel? The Book of the Week is an authentic dime novel printed in 1899, Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road by Edward L. Wheeler.

Dime novels (and their cousins the "story papers," formatted like a newspaper) were the predecessors to pulp magazines and paperback books. Between approximately the 1860's and 1920's, dime novels were an inexpensive alternative to hardback books. They were sometimes priced at ten cents, but more commonly at five cents - I guess "nickel novel" just didn't have the right ring to it. (Thanks to the exchange rate at the time, dime novels in England went by the even more colorful moniker "penny dreadfuls.") In most cases, dime novels were not really novels, but short stories. Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road is a typical example, comprised of a single 32-page story.

Dime novels were intended to be accessible to the masses, who were by then predominately literate. Dime novels were generally written in the vernacular and were commonly targeted at adolescent readers, which is why "You sound like a dime novel" is a disparaging remark. Many at the time worried that dime novels glorified low-brow discourse and would have a disastrous effect on American culture. You will not be surprised to learn that by our modern standards, dime novels seem quite innocent and even rather intellectual.

Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road is the first of a series of 64 Deadwood Dick adventures, originally published between 1878 and 1884 by Beadle & Adams, the very first dime novel publisher, then reprinted by the Arthur Westbrook Co., beginning in 1899 with the Book of the Week. Deadwood Dick was among the most popular heroes of the dime novels. Although Deadwood Dick has long been forgotten by everyone save a handful of collectors, he had a lasting cultural impact. As shown in the cover illustration of this book, Deadwood Dick was a masked crusader of the Old West. He almost certainly inspired the creators of the Lone Ranger and Zorro, who came along decades later. (If you thought Zorro was a centuries-old legend, or perhaps even an actual historical figure, you have been hoodwinked by Hollywood. Zorro was invented by pulp writer Johnston McCulley and first appeared in 1919 in the pages of the pulp magazine All-Story.)

Dime novels were squeezed out of the market by the growing popularity of pulp magazines in the 1910's and 20's. Dell Books attempted to resurrect the dime novel format in 1951. Next week's Book of the Week will be an example of the Dell series of dime novels.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: The African Queen by C.S. Forester

Last week's Magazine of the Week uncovered a C.S. Forester fan in our midst, so in his honor the Book of the Week is the first paperback printing of The African Queen by C.S. Forester. The unlikely love story of a boozing sailor and a religious Englishwoman forced to make their way together through central Africa, The African Queen is perhaps Forester's most famous novel, certainly his most famous outside of the Hornblower series. The African Queen was filmed by John Huston in 1951 and starred Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart, who won the only Oscar of his career for his performance.

In lieu of the first hardcover edition -- published in England in 1935 and currently selling in London's rare book shops for around $25,000 -- this is the original paperback edition, Bantam 712, first printed in 1949. As reflected in Ken Riley's suggestive cover art, the novel is a bit spicier than the film version. This American edition has a different ending than the original British edition, and the ending of the movie is different than either. As usual, the Hollywood ending is the happiest.

Aaron's Magazine of the Week - February 26, 1938 issue of Argosy

Thanks to Quentin Tarantino, the phrase "pulp fiction" has come back into use, but many have forgotten its origin. For the first half of the Twentieth Century, the popular market for fiction was dominated by "pulp" magazines. The Magazine of the Week is the February 26, 1938 issue of Argosy, arguably the most successful of the pulp magazines.

"Pulp magazines" are so named for the pressed wood pulp on which they were printed. Publishers used cheap wood pulp in lieu of ordinary paper both to keep costs down in a highly competitive market and due to paper shortages during the wars. Because they were printed on such poor quality wood pulp, most pulp magazines have disintegrated over time, and any copy that has survived in good condition is now a collector's item.

Pulp magazines tended to garish covers and sensationalistic stories -- the term "pulp fiction" refers to this exuberant but unpolished style -- but the pulps also printed a great deal of excellent fiction. Between the late 1890's and the early 1950's, many important American authors such as Jack London and Tennessee Williams got their starts in the pulps, and it is difficult to name a significant early writer of mystery, romance, science fiction and fantasy, horror, or westerns who did not write for the pulps. Indeed, the very concept of dividing fiction into these different genres originated with the pulps.

The February 26, 1938 issue of Argosy is a typical example of pulp fiction. It contains some short fiction best left forgotten, but also the first appearance of Ship of the Line, a Horatio Hornblower novel by C.S. Forester, whose outstanding sea adventures remain widely read to this day, as well as the conclusion of a novel by Luke Short, a successful author of westerns. (Argosy and other pulps often printed novel-length works by serializing them over several issues.) Incidentally, the apparent holes in the cover of this magazine are with one exception a deliberate part of the cover art -- Hornblower's ship HMS Sutherland and her French adversary are giving each other a pounding.

Argosy was the first of the all-fiction pulps, switched to that format by publisher Frank Munsey in 1896. Before the pulps came along, however, there was yet an earlier option for fiction readers who did not wish to pay for hardcover books. You will see an example of that format next week.

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.

Aaron's Book of The Week :: Lost Horizon by James Hilton

This week's Book of the Week is Lost Horizon by James Hilton. Written in 1933 and successfully adapted to the screen by Frank Capra in 1937, Lost Horizon tells of the discovery of a lost civilization high in the Himalayas. Such lost world stories were popular in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, but the subgenre dried up as the notion of finding a civilization hidden from the modern world became absurdly implausible.

This edition of Lost Horizon is Pocket Book #1. Sadly, my copy is not the very scarce first printing, which you can tell from Gertrude the Kangaroo's presence in the lower right corner of the cover. Pocket created the Gertrude logo in May of 1939, shortly after the first copies of Lost Horizon were printed, and she continues to adorn Pocket Books to this day, although she's lost weight over the years.

Lost Horizon is often described as the first paperback book ever published. This is flatly untrue (I believe I warned you that book collectors are incorrigible liars), since for many years previously some publishers had released paper-bound copies, i.e. copies with the covers missing, of certain of their hardcover books. What collectors really mean is that Lost Horizon was the first pocket-sized, mass-market paperback, but then this is also flatly untrue, since it was preceded by a 1938 Pocket Books unnumbered edition of The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, distributed in New York as a test market. Collectors will pay thousands of dollars for that edition of The Good Earth, calling it the real first paperback. But this is in turn flatly untrue, because Penguin Books had already started selling mass-market paperbacks in England in 1935. Next week's Book of the Week will be a Penguin paperback published before either Lost Horizon or The Good Earth came out. (I regret that I don't have a copy to show you of the unnumbered edition of The Good Earth, the single most valuable paperback book in existence according to my trusty Holroyd's Paperback Prices, but I did recently acquire one of the Top 5 most valuable paperbacks, which you will see in a future BOTW installment.)

Aaron's Book of the Week :: Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley

We continue our tribute to Robert Sheckley (1928-2005) with Immortality, Inc., Sheckley's first novel. Originally published in an abridged version called Immortality Delivered in 1958, this 1959 edition is the first printing, paperback original of the complete version. Immortality, Inc. was a nominee for the Hugo Award for best science fiction or fantasy novel of 1958. It has a wonderfully bizarre opening line, the kind that is possible only in science fiction and fantasy: "Afterwards, Thomas Blaine thought about the manner of his dying and wished it had been more interesting."

Immortality, Inc. was made into a 1992 film called Freejack, starring Emilio Estevez. The film was not good and entirely lacked Sheckley's trademark humor. Several of Sheckley's novels have been made into movies, and while I have not seen the others, I have it on good authority that only one is worth watching: The Tenth Victim (1965), starring Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress. In general, film producers and directors do not understand written science fiction and routinely butcher the SF stories they attempt to adapt to the screen. (The same used to be true of fantasy, but that is starting to change, thanks largely to Peter Jackson). This is why fans of written SF are forever trying to distance themselves from Hollywood SF - although most of us actually like to watch the movies, even the bad ones.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: Untouched by Human Hands by Robert Sheckley

The Book of the Week is Untouched by Human Hands by noted science fiction author Robert Sheckley, who passed away on Friday.

Robert Sheckley was an important contributor to the science fiction field in the 1950s and 60s, and continued to write sporadically and to interact with fans until his death. He was one of the earliest science fiction and fantasy writers to make humor an important part of nearly all his work, and he is said to have been a major influence on Douglas Adams, creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Sheckley was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001. Untouched by Human Hands, a collection of short stories, was Sheckley's first book. My copy is the first printing, paperback original (cover art by Jack Coggins), published in 1954.

Incidentally, "paperback original" (or "PBO") means that there was no prior hardcover edition. From the 1950s through the 70s, most science fiction books went straight to paperback without any hardcover edition (and many still do to this day), which is why any science fiction collector must necessarily also be a collector of vintage paperbacks - speaking of which, we will still get to Pocket Book #1 eventually.

Book Review Teaser :: A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin

Continuing with the A Song of Ice and Fire posts, Aaron has reviewed A Clash of Kings, book two in the series, by George R.R. Martin on Fantastic Reviews. The cover shown is the orginal hardcover. I like this cover much better than the "people-less" cover art on the new editions. (For an example of the new cover art concept, see A Feast for Crows).

From Aaron's review:
"A Clash of Kings is the second volume of George R. R. Martin's highly successful series, A Song of Ice and Fire. A Song of Ice and Fire is a lengthy retelling, with added fantastic elements, of the War of the Roses. So I am told, anyway; I am no British historian...."

"A Clash of Kings picks up soon after A Game of Thrones left off. The threats to the Seven Kingdoms from the supernatural Others in the North and from dragons and nomadic Dothraki warriors across the sea have yet to materialize. As for the internal struggles for control of the Seven Kingdoms, however, the battle has been joined."

To read the entire review (warning: there are spoilers):
A Clash of Kings

Aaron's Book of the Week :: A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

The Book of the Week is a signed copy of the first edition of A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. A Game of Thrones is the first book in the Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, the fourth volume of which - last week's Book of the Week, A Feast for Crows - hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list a week ago.

One of the peculiarities of collecting books is that authors' most successful books are often not the ones in which collectors are interested. Because A Feast for Crows is selling so well, it will never be a rare book, for there are too many copies of it in circulation. However, the success of the later books in the Song of Ice and Fire series has caused the original edition of A Game of Thrones, which did not sell very well when released, to become a highly prized collector's item, only nine years after it was published.

Incidentally, the cover depicts the throne of the imaginary kingdom various characters vie to control in A Song of Ice and Fire. Called the "Iron Throne," it was constructed by an earlier ruler out of the swords of his vanquished enemies. This makes it a rather hazardous and uncomfortable place to sit, a nice visual representation of the Shakespeare line, "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."