My signed Ray Bradbury first edition buying spree continues apace, and I picked up a Stanley G. Weinbaum first I’d been wanting to buy for a long time.
Posts Tagged ‘Stanley G. Weinbaum’
Library Additions: Two Interesting Books
Friday, February 20th, 2015Library Additions: Stanley G. Weinbaum’s Dawn of Flame
Monday, September 16th, 2013I’m still recovering from the 2013 Worldcon, LoneStarCon 3 in San Antonio.
Given how often I blog about additions to my science fiction library, you might be surprised at how parsimonious I am paying for those additions. From about 1985 (when I first started buying first edition hardbacks) to 1989, I never paid more than $35 (plus shipping) for a book, which was about what it cost you to buy a UK hardback from an SF book dealer like L. W. Currey, Mark Ziesing, Robert Weinberg, etc. at the time. (And you bought it from a catalog you received in the mail, called them up to hold the book, then sent them a check. No ordering from the Internet or paying via Paypal. Now get off my lawn!) Then I found a NF/VG+ copy of The Haunting of Hill House for $45 at the 1989 Boston Worldcon, and the dealer wouldn’t budge on the price, so I coughed it up.
As I made more money at my day job, I could afford to buy more expensive books, and the amount I was willing to pay for a single book slowly and surely crept up. Eventually I ended up spending $400 for a very clean, signed, ex-library edition of Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. Since then I’ve spent around $400 for a few more books, but have only exceeded that amount thrice:
But I’ve never spent more than $675 for a single book.
Until now:
Weinbaum, Stanley G. Dawn of Flame. Ruppert Printing Service (for The Milwaukee Fictioneers), 1936. One of only 245 copies of the Currey B state (with the Lawrence A. Keating introduction), a Near Fine+ copy with very faint spine creasing and either slight gray staining to bottom page block (or possibly where the red page block staining has worn away), sans dust jacket, as issued. Currey, page 510. Chalker/Owings, page 279. Bleiler, Checklist (1978), page 204. Locke, Spectrum of Fantasy (I), page 224.
Bought at the San Antonio Worldcon for $1,200 (negotiated down from $1,500) from Erle Melvin Korshak. And if I’m remembering correctly, it was on consignment from Sam Moskowitz’s widow through Robert Weinberg to Korshak. (Korshak, of course, was the owner of Shasta Publishers, and is now back in publishing as Shasta/Phoenix Publishers.)
This copy contains the ownership bookplate of Richard A. Frank, an early science fiction fan who was also an SF small press publisher in his own right, having published “The Bizarre Series” in the late 1930s, featuring works by A. A. Merritt, David H. Keller and Eando Binder.
Frank also had one of the first legendary SF collections. “Richard Frank’s entire book collection was fantastic. He had it, originally, in the house, but the weight of the books had begun to pull the floors away from the the walls, so he moved it all down to his first floor garage and set it up like a real library. Most of us felt that if Richard didn’t have a copy—it hadn’t been printed.”
That’s an awful damn lot of money to spend on a book, but I’ve long wanted a copy, both because I love Weinbaum’s work (a visionary and ground-breaking Sf writer in his day), and because this is the very first SF small press book. It’s often called “the bible of the field,” because it physically resembles a bible, right down to the flexible black binding, red-stained page block edges and rounded corners. Save for the one Ray Palmer introduction copy sold at the Jerry Weist Auction, this is the finest copy I’ve seen offered for sale recently, and I did well enough at Worldcon that I felt I could afford it.
After Action Report on Heritage Auction’s Sale of the Jerry Weist Collection
Monday, September 19th, 2011Every year or two, Heritage Auctions in Dallas conducts a big auction of a major science fiction book collection. In 2007, it was the Ventura Collection.
The Ventura Collection auction was very successful, and since it occurred right before the advent of The Great Recession, many of the prices achieved in that auction have not since been equaled. (It may also be the first auction catalog Heritage mass-mailed to prospective SF collectors; I had not received any before then.)
In 2008, it was The Robert and Diane Yaspan collection, which included a vast array of SF firsts as well as several SF manuscripts and a few select non-SF firsts, such as many firsts by mystery writer Earle Stanley Gardener.
Later in 2008 was the auction of The Frank Collection, which was mainly SF art, but included a number of notable SF first editions as well.
The just completed auction of the Jerry Weist collection was of the same caliber. There was some original art and pulp magazines in the collection, but the bulk of it was collectible SF/F/H first editions. The auction realized more than $1 million (though a significant fraction of that was for the artworks).
I’m going to talk about some of the more interesting items sold, and how the prices realized compared to comparable copies of the same firsts in previous years. I’ll also mention when I have a copy of the first edition discussed in my own library.
A few general observations:
Holy Grails
To me, far and away the most interesting and desirable item was one of only five copies of Stanley G. Weinbaum’s Dawn of Flame to have the unsigned introduction by Amazing editor Ray Palmer. Weinbaum’s widow evidently objected to the introduction, which is why only five copies were so produced. Even the 245 copy Currey B state (with Lawrence Keating’s introduction replacing Palmer’s) is rare enough, and the book is widely considered the first true SF small press book. I don’t believe I’d seen a copy of the Palmer state for sale before, but I think one was sold when the Sam Moskowitz collection was auctioned off (they didn’t send me a catalog). Moreover, this particular copy once belonged to legendary collector and fan Forrest J. Ackerman, and was inscribed by him to Weist. Counting the buyer’s premium (a little shy of 20%, and which I’m going to include for all the other prices listed here), it went for $9,560.00; it wouldn’t have surprised me to see it go for twice that much.
There were some other SF collecting “holy grails” sold there:
Other Notable Books
From Holy Grails we move on to books that are merely Really Freaking Expensive. There are usually a few copies of these bumping around on Bookfinder.com, albeit with a comma in the price.
One of the most puzzling results of the auction was a signed first of Curt Siomdak’s Skyport was initially reported going for a stunning $8,611.17. That’s only about $8,500 more than it’s worth. But now when you go to the auction page for the item itself, it shows a far saner $101.58. I’m assuming there was some sort of glitch.
Slightly less puzzling was a signed, Near Fine copy of L. Sprague de Camp’s The Wheels of If (which has one of Hannes Bok’s most famous dust jacket illustrations) went for $717, which is a good bit more than it usually goes for; Lloyd Currey has a comparable-to-better signed copy online right now for $150. Before this I had the impression de Camp was out of fashion among collectors (and thus I have been able to pick up a number of signed copies of his work pretty cheap). I suspect this is an outlier.
Although I bid on several items, I only won one: an Ex-Library first of the UK David Bruce & Watson (first hardback) edition of Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man for $95.60. Fine copies go for over a grand.
Related Topics
Other science fiction book collecting topics (and glimpses into my own bibliomania) you might find of interest: