Paperback Fanatic 18

Groovy Agers, I've been derelict of duty in bringing news of the latest issue of Paperback Fanatic--blame it on my recent move, from which I'm still unpacking. Then again, if you had a subscription (and you should!), you wouldn't need me to tell you.

EIC Justin Marriott continues to make amazing use of both the format size and color. When I say he makes great use of color, I don't just mean he does a lot of color reproductions of awesome vintage paperback covers, though he certainly does that; he also colors select pages, as in this two-page spread:

That could be an easy thing to overdo, and Marriott doesn't. He uses it sparingly enough to keep it effective and add just a dash of visual interest. He also, per reader requests, has been adding vintage adverts, and the one he includes here is worth the price of admission all by itself (you really need to see it, and I don't want to spoil it for you--yes, there's actually an ad that could be spoiled!).

Visuals aside, the content has always been and remains the real reason Paperback Fanatic is such a treasure. The central pillars of this issue are Marriott's own article about Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane stories and the various editions in which they appeared down through the years (a timely piece, considering Jeff Jones's artwork on some of the latter), and also Ramsey Campbell's reminiscences about editing and completing a number of unfinished stories and fragments.

I think I most personally enjoyed Marriott's piece on the Sergeant Fury series. This paragraph certainly resonated with me:

I really struggled with this series, with Levinson applying what I would describe as the "McCurtin" (after Peter McCurtin) school of minimalism to his writing, meaning even the action scenes are dull and perfunctory. And despite being laced with colourful profanities, the dialogue is clunky and corny. I am really struggling to look for the positives with these and coming up short.

Ah yes, I know the feeling well enough to have sworn off paperbacks altogether for a while, after too many awesome-looking series turned out to be such dreck.

On another personal note, it's a real point of pride for me to host probably the first and at-the-time only English-language site on the internet that covered not only the Italian fumetti, but also the German Groschenromane. Holger Haase, my buddy from Eurotrash Paradise, helped me get that off the ground, and then Andy Decker stepped up and did yeoman's work introducing us to this groovy format/medium. He reprises and summarizes much of that great stuff now in this issue of Fanatic, and yes it's worth reading even if you've read all his posts here.

There's plenty more I'll leave for you to discover, and I'd urge you to do so, if you have any interest in vintage paperbacks. Snatch this issue before it sells out (as almost all previous issues have done), then subscribe so you don't miss any more.

Book Sale

Twice a year, October and June, the Kalamazoo Public Library hosts a book sale where you can fill a bag for two bucks. This is the booty I got this year;

Faerie Tales Edited by Martin H. Greenburg & Russell Davis
The Bane Of The Black Sword by Michael Moorcock
The Barbarian of World's End by Lin Carter
Whipping Star by Frank Herbert
The Dosadi Experiment by Frank Herbert
The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction Edited by Robert P. Mills
Invasion Of The Robots  Edited by Roger Elwood
Mike Mars Around The Moon by Donald Wolheim
The Devil Wives of Li Fong by E. Hoffman Price
Fuzzy Bones by H. Beam Piper
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
The Golden Apples Of The Sun by Ray Bradbury
The Weird of The White Wolf by Michael Moorcock
The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Michael Moorcock
Elric of Melnibone by Michael Moorcock
Raven, Swordmistress of Chaos by Richard Kirk
The Comic Book Killer by Richard A. Lupoff
The Infinite Man by Daniel F. Galouye
Stories From The Twilight Zone by Rod Serling
Dr. Cyclops by Henry Kuttner
The Fate of the Phoenix by Sondra Marshak & Myrna Culbreath
The Vanishing Tower by Michael Moorcock
The Best Science Fiction of the Year Edited by Terry Carr
The Spellstone of Shaltus by Linda E. Bushyager
Tales From The Vulgar Unicorn by Robert Lynn Asprin
The Time Axis by Henry Kuttner
The Man Who Awoke by Laurence Manning
Had I But Groaned by Carter Brown
The Secret of the Martian Moons by Donlad Wollheim
The Secret of Saturn's Rings by Donald Wollheim
The Unknown 5 Edited by D.R. Bensen
After Things Fell Apart by Ron Goulart
The Invaders by Keith Laumer
Exploring Other Worlds Edited bySam Moskowitz
Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
Telefon by Walter Wager (And,yes, Bronson is on the cover)
Garbage World by Charles Platt
Galactic Odyssey by Keith Laumer
Invaders From Rigel by Fletcher Pratt
The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney
Swords and Deviltry by Fritz Leiber
Saga of Lost Earths by Emil Petaja
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
The Coming of the Robots Edited by Sam Moskowitz
The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Mooseheart, The City of Children by Robert W. Wells
A Collection of Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
Jewel of Doom by Nick Carter
The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
Darwin's Blade by Dan Simmons
Synthetic Men Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Master Mind of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Savage Pellucidar byEdgar Rice Burroughs
Frankenstein by MAry Shelley (Cool Karloff style monster art on the cover)
The Age of the Pussyfoot by Frederik Pohl
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Flash Gordon: The Plague of Sound by Alex Raymond adapted by Con Steffanson

I am really excited about the Henry Kutner books and the Flash Gordon book. The most bizarre one might be the Mooseheart book. It concerns the city of Mooseheart, Illinois and their link to The Moose Lodge and how they put children first in the city. There is a color section of pictures in the middle that shows how the children are being groomed to go into the world and educate everyone in the wy of the moose. Hilarious!

Carless in Savannah

Downtown Savannah is so walkable, in deciding to move here, I decided to rid myself of the hassles and expenses of a car. Having lived in NYC and London, and happily done without a car in either place, this was nothing new to me, and I'm loving it as much here as I did there. This has a lot less to do with environmentalism than with simple quality of life for me. The next time you're in a car, just make a mental note every time something aggravates you--the price of gas, dealing with traffic, your service light coming on, parking spot issues, etc. All that stress adds up more than we know, I think, and I'm glad now to be free of it.

I have a great neighborhood Kroger literally around the corner; I've probably carried groceries farther in a Wal Mart parking lot than I do from this place to my own front door.

Absurdly, I used to have to drive to an ugly, boring quarter-mile track if I wanted to jog; now I just jog a few blocks over and I've got the stunningly beautiful Forsyth Park, which is an even mile around on each lap, and, you know, stunningly beautiful. And surrounded by gorgeous historic homes. And always full of people doing fun stuff. And there are friendly doggies getting walked everywhere. I also walk, jog, or bike to the gym, which only makes sense, though I never could have done it previously.

I ride my bike to and from work now, which is an astonishingly soothing way to both begin and end the work day (now that I mention it, there's something just as calming about seeing all these other people on bikes--it's almost like watching fish drift around in an aquarium). Admittedly, I haven't had to deal with a downpour yet, or extremes of heat or cold, but the truth is, I always had to deal with them anyway in walking from whatever parking I could find (one of the hassles/expenses I'm most happy to be done with) to my work, which inevitably was always quite a few blocks' distance.

Amanda Marcotte deals nicely with the ZOMG SWEAT!!1! issue in this reply to objections to her post on cycling: "Even in Texas, most of the year I did not sweat while cycling. The key is a leisurely pace. Do you run everywhere you walk?" On flat terrain, you can do a lot of coasting with little enough effort that you'd probably sweat more if you walked a significantly shorter distance.

It's nice, as well, to have no drinking/driving concerns at all any more. As Atrios points out:

A big reason people drink and drive is we put bars in the middle of giant parking lots far away from any human habitation. I'm not sure what they expect will happen, but I think the consequences are pretty predictable.

Part of what's great about downtown Savannah is how ridiculously many fun, cool drinking establishments are within walking distance for residents. I think I could go on a different pub crawl every night of the year without exhausting the possible combinations, and always stagger home on my own two feet.

The eating is fantastic downtown, too. So many great local places in every price range, and not a Crapplebees in sight.

As for live music, I'm where it's at. Bigger acts like Wilco (whom I saw last year) will go to the downtown Civic Center, and smaller acts will certainly end up somewhere else downtown, most likely on Congress Street. There's no place in Savannah that's not downtown where any live music worth mentioning would appear.

It's a shame how flatly impossible this kind of life is for the vast majority of people in America. Part of that "impossibility" is the weird hostility the very idea seems to bring out in many motorists. The track I used to jog on was visible from a fairly active road, and it never ceased to amaze me how many morans felt compelled to shout something at me from a passing car (or usually truck), just because I was doing something--anything--on foot. In downtown Savannah, such an asshole would have to yodel nonstop to the point of hoarseness long before he insulted every pedestrian or cyclist in his path. That must be why nobody ever seems to bug me downtown.

By the way, I understand that cyclists can be exasperating to motorists when they have to share road-space that's really designed exclusively for cars. Downtown Savannah does a good job not only with bike lanes, but also with channeling cars along certain straight-on one-way roads, and leaving the more circuitous streets around the squares a lot more pedestrian- and bike-friendly.

I also got a big, bad taste of how impossible/utopian this kind of lifestyle would be for most people when I ventured by bus to "southside" Savannah--the part that's like every other comparable-sized city in America--and tried to get around on foot between a Wal Mart, a mall, and a Target, which are all right across the street from each other. Atrios has the right of it again:

One thing that's been puzzling me lately is just how unconcerned parking lots are with the pedestrian experience. I get that parking lots are about, you know, cars, but people still have to travel from their cars to the Wal-Mart somehow yet there's almost nothing in their design to appropriately accommodate people.

Any parking lot designed for ultra-mega-gonzo-Black Friday capacity has no human scale whatsoever. Which essentially means none of them do. When the bus doesn't have a stop near the entrance, but instead drops you off at the ass-end of one of these gargantuan lots, it's a long, boring, ugly, possibly hazardous walk to the shopping center or store. What's more, I've found these places tend not to have much in the way of sidewalks anywhere in their vicinity. The traffic signals near them often don't have crosswalks. The number of lanes and speed of traffic render them, again, practically inhuman. These places are downright anti-walkable. Considering how far they are from anywhere residential, I guess it makes sense to assume that anyone visiting them will come in a vehicle. And the other side of that coin is, most people live not walking but driving distance from any grocery stores, retail shopping, services like hair salons, etc. So, lots of cars, and lots of exclusively car-friendly spaces.

The one downside to downtown living is, there's no place where you can just go get home products or furnishings that aren't antique or hand-crafted (and priced accordingly). I understand why they'll never, ever let a big box downtown, but it would sure be nice once in a while if I could get to one safely and conveniently by foot or bike, if I just need an ironing board or pack of dvd-r's or whatever.