Finding Old SF Books and Magazines -- in the Sixties

[Extollager]

This piece

https://www.fanac.org/fanzines/Collectors_Bulletin/Collectors_Bulletin10.pdf

that I just ran across will recall for some readers here, recreate for others, what it could be like, say 55 years ago, to hunt for sf paperbacks and the like in thrift stores and junk shops. The source is a dittoed fanzine for collectors -- i.e. for those who were lucky enough to know of traders and dealers. When you were a kid just starting out, though, you probably didn't know of them. What a change now, when one can find it all on abebooks.com, etc. You could assemble a collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks, for example, in 10 minutes now -- something that might have taken years back then.

 

[dask]

The fanac link keeps resetting itself so I never get past the page with a request for a Frank Denton article. Bet it was good if he wrote one.

 

[Extollager]

The fanac link keeps resetting itself so I never get past the page with a request for a Frank Denton article. Bet it was good if he wrote one.

It's credited to Joanna Burger.

 

[Extollager]

I’ll try to post Burger’s article as three scans.

 

[Extollager]

 

[Extollager]

 

[Extollager]

OK -- there it is -- readable, I hope.

We're better off now overall, but it was fun to buy old paperbacks and sf magazines from dealers who had no idea of the value (to some people) of some of the things on their shelves.

I found the image below online. What a bunch of once-familiar paperback standbyes! Perhaps some of us scanned spines like those, hoping to spot something of interest, many years ago. But not, perhaps, here: not a sf book in the lot.

 

[J Riff]

around 61-2ish, the 'Book Exchange' had racks of comics, 2 for 1 trade or a nickle each. Pocket books were ten cents.
Already, EC comics, particularly the ScienceFiction ones, were grabbed up by collectors before they went out for sale. Amazing Fantasy and the other Marvel stuffr=, was all there. Pocketbooks lined the walls, and even much later in the 70s you could find lots of good SF PBs at book stores, garage, church or estate sales. Worth a fortune now, those comics especially. Just never mind what happened to my collection.

 

[hitmouse]

This is a really nice thread.
The sort of rambly, slightly chaotic second hand bookstores, with shelves of neglected pulp SF paperbacks, that I frequented as kid in the 70s and 80s, are quite uncommon now in the UK. ebay and Abebooks are a much easier way to sell. A problem with this is that everyone knows the nominal value of everything, so the old bargains and surprise finds are rare.

Another significant difference is that back then there was much less information about what was actually out there in terms of authors, books, series, genres. Most of my information was gleaned from the flyleaf adverts in the back of books, or from a SF encyclopedia I bought in the late 1970s (which listed a lot of US stuff that was simply unavailalble.) So a lot of purchases were very speculative and opportunistic. Hard to imagine now with Wikipedia and Youtube.

 

[Extollager]

Hitmouse, was that SF encyclopedia the one edited by Peter Nicholls?

The hours that I've spent with that big book......

 

[KiraAnn]

I occasionally find worthwhile books in Goodwill stores. Probably don't have those in the UK.

My last haul was from the city library's annual sale of books that don't get rented very often. Makes room so they can buy new ones.

 

[Extollager]

A few years ago, Bob Jennings' fanzine Fadeaway published my reminiscences of H&H Furniture Company in Coos Bay, Oregon, a second-hand store that sometimes sold used copies of comics and (as I recall) some paperbacks.

https://efanzines.com/Fadeaway/Fadeway-49.pdf

This was my effort to capture in words what a place like that could look and smell like, and mean, to a kid of 12 or so in the late 1960s. The comics were often not in "collectible" condition, but then we hardly thought in such terms at the time. It might have been at H&H that I bought one of the first sf paperbacks I ever owned, Lester del Rey's not very good Siege Perilous, with a Freas cover that appealed to me a lot. Was that novel ever reprinted?

 

[hitmouse]

Hitmouse, was that SF encyclopedia the one edited by Peter Nicholls?

The hours that I've spent with that big book......

It was The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction ed Brian Ash. I dont know how much time I spent poring over that book. It still looks pretty handsome. I posted some shots from it on a classic anthologies thread a couple of months ago.
I got the Peter Nicholls book a few years later.

 

[dask]

It was The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction ed Brian Ash. I dont know how much time I spent poring over that book. It still looks pretty handsome. I posted some shots from it on a classic anthologies thread a couple of months ago.
I got the Peter Nicholls book a few years later.

Have that book. Love it.