Posts Tagged ‘Stanton Coblentz’

Library Additions: Nine Armchair Fiction TPOs

Saturday, June 16th, 2018

Before I sent out the latest Lame Excuse Books catalog, I picked up some Armchair Fiction books for stock, as well as some for my own library:

  • Moore, Ward, and Geoff St. Reynard. RX Jupiter Save Us and Beware, The Usurpers! Armchair Fiction, 2011. First edition trade paperback original (a POD production, like all Armchair Fiction books), a Fine copy, new and unread. Two short novels in one package, Ward Moore’s RX Jupiter Save Us, and Beware, The Usurpers! by Geoff St. Reynard (which the SF Encyclopedia says was a pseudonym for Robert Wilson Krepps). Mainly picked this up for the Ward Moore, which does not appear to have been reprinted since its appearance in Future Science Fiction in 1954.
  • Moore, Ward and George O. Smith. Transient and The World-Mover. Armchair Fiction, 2013. First edition trade paperback original (a POD production, like all Armchair Fiction books), a Fine copy, new and unread. Two short novels in one package. Ward Moore’s Transient has a cover blurb says “lost in a landscape of confusion and distorted reality” and features a unicorn rearing above a guy in a spacesuit. Smith had quite a nice career in the 40s and 50s, with books from Gnome Press, Prime Press, etc. Neither of these seems to have been reprinted since their original magazine appearances (1950 for the Smith, 1960 for the Moore).
  • Shaver, Richard S. The Shaver Mystery Book Five. Armchair Fiction, 2014. First edition trade paperback original (a POD production, like all Armchair Fiction books), a Fine copy, new and unread. Three reprinted Shaver Mystery stories and “Mr. Shaver’s Lemurian Alphabet.” Companion to the four earlier Armchair Fiction Shaver Mystery volumes.
  • Shaver, Richard S. The Shaver Mystery Book Six. Armchair Fiction, 2015. First edition trade paperback original (a POD production, like all Armchair Fiction books), a Fine copy, new and unread. Four more reprinted Shaver Mystery stories, including one, “The Land of Kui,” with footnotes by editor Raymond Palmer, plus an Introduction, a Forward from the original magazine appearance, and the non-fiction piece “The Key To Mantong,” an “ancient language” used in various Shaver Mystery stories. Shaver was almost as obsessed with philology as J.R.R. Tolkien, except without all that annoying in-depth scholarship and understanding…
  • Shaver, Richard S. The Shaver Mystery Book Seven. Armchair Fiction, 2016. First edition trade paperback original (a POD production, like all Armchair Fiction books), a Fine copy, new and unread. Four more reprinted Shaver Mystery stories and “The Dictionary of the Mantong Language.”
  • Silverberg, Robert. Masters of Science Fiction Vol. 11: Robert Silverberg: The Ace Years, Part One (Chalice of Death AKA Earth Shall Live Again! AKA Vengeance of the Space Armadas AKA Lest We Forget Thee Earth, Starhaven and Shadow on the Stars). Armchair Fiction, 2017. First edition trade paperback original (a POD production, like all Armchair Fiction books), a Fine copy, new and unread. Includes five Silverberg short novels original published as Ace doubles under pseudonyms (Chalice of Death (AKA Earth Shall Live Again! AKA Vengeance of the Space Armadas AKA Lest We Forget Thee Earth) as by Calvin M. Knox, Starhaven and Shadow on the Stars as by Ivar Jorgenson), plus two stories (“The Impossible Intelligence” and “Overlord of Colony 8”) compiled into one volume, with a lengthy new introduction by Silverberg. The two stories have never been reprinted since their initial magazine appearances.
  • Silverberg, Robert. Masters of Science Fiction Vol. 12: Robert Silverberg: The Ace Years, Part Two (The Planet Killers, The Plot Against Earth, One of Our Asteroids is Missing). Armchair Fiction, 2017. First edition trade paperback original (a POD production, like all Armchair Fiction books), a Fine copy, new and unread. Includes three short novels (The Planet Killers, The Plot Against Earth and One of Our Asteroids is Missing as by Calvin M. Knox), as well as a novelette (“Death’s Planet, which has never been reprinted in English since its magazine appearance) and the short story “The Assassin.”
  • Wellman, Manly Wade, and Stanton Coblentz. Warrior of Two Worlds and Enchantress of Lemuria. Armchair Fiction, 2017. First edition trade paperback original (a POD production, like all Armchair Fiction books), a Fine copy, new and unread. Two short novels in one package. Warrior of Two Worlds, in which a dead warrior is resurrected to defend his planet from invaders, is a Wellman novel that evidently hasn’t been reprinted since it’s original 1944 appearance, whereas Coblentz’s Enchantress of Lemuria had one reprint in a paperback anthology back in 1971. Wellman was an extremely good horror writer, and I’m trying to collect all his work. Coblentz was a prolific and well-regarded early-to-mid 20th science fiction writer whose work was published by Fantasy Press and FPCI, but seems to have fallen completely off the map except for people who collect mid-century small press works.
  • Wellman, Manly Wade, and Ralph Milne Farley and Al P. Nelson. West Point 3000 A.D. and Holy City of Mars. Armchair Fiction, 2016. First edition trade paperback original (a POD production, like all Armchair Fiction books), a Fine copy, new and unread. Another Armchair Fiction double. The Wellman appears to have one previous POD publication. Farley, like Coblentz, is pretty much forgotten these days. Nelson evidently only did this and one other collaboration with Farley.
  • I still have the Ward Moores and the Wellman/Coblentz volumes available for sale through Lame Excuse Books…