September Collection Post

It looks like we are doing this again--welcome to September's blog post about stuff I recently bought, stuff I would have tweeted about if I hadn't lost my X account to diabolical hackers, crackers, and fraud and deceit backers.  Click the pictures below to get an eyeful of all the filthy details.  

In Mt. Airy, MD, in a shopping center with a Weis grocery store where you can buy Ovaltine and a Home Goods where you can buy the mass produced plastic Chinese Christmas decorations you need to fill up your basement, your attic, and that hole in your soul, also sits the Toy Exchange, a store which is choked full of old toy robots and monsters.  There I acquired this beige (Ajax? Archer?) spacewoman and this blue and silver Rascal Robot for five bucks each, even though I already had a blue-green spacewoman and four other Rascal Robots--it felt like a real bargain.

As a kid I was dinosaur crazy, and I collect the dinosaur books I owned, borrowed from the library, and saw at other kids' houses in my childhood, as well as dinosaur books of a similar aesthetic and appeal.  I found this one, which I had never seen before, at Beaver Creek Antiques in Hagerstown, MD.

Another Beaver Creek Antiques find--a book of poetry by Emil Petaja with illustrations by Hannes Bok.  Regular readers of MPorcius Fiction Log will be aware of how big a fan I am of Bok.  As for Petaja...well, I read his novel about space crabs eating people back in 2014, as well as his novel about the best pilot in the Terran Space Navy who is also Earth's best psyker who also goes back in time to deal with a witch and a giant.  Click the links to get a sense of what io thought of Petaja's fiction. 

As for Petaja's poetry in this book, As Dream and Shadow, a lot of it has Lovecraftian themes--there's a direct reference to Cthulhu, and lots of stuff about dreams and the idea that knowledge will not help you, but drive you insane.  Worth looking at for the weird completist.

At Wonder Book in Hagerstown, MD, I picked up some paperbacks because I liked their covers and because I could get them free because my wife had bought something and had filled up my points card or whatever they call it.  Every store nowadays has a card you have to carry around or an app you have to download or a club you have to join or something, even the used bookstore.

Richard Matheson's Third From the Sun has a mesmerizing Gene Szafran cover and reprints 13 stories from the earlier collection Born From Man and Woman.  Of these 13 tales I believe I have blogged about four: "Mad House," "Lover, When You're Near Me," "The Wedding," and "Disappearing Act."  I would have thought I'd read more, as I feel like I have read many Matheson stories--maybe I read some of them before I started the blog.  I'm actually curious to read this thing, maybe soon.

Then we have The 27th Day by John Mantley, which has a cool Richard Powers cover painting, a painting obscured by line drawings of the five people whom the aliens have given the power to destroy the world.  It looks like the world is in trouble--the aliens gave a college professor and what look like a Maoist spy and a Soviet commissar the power to destroy the world.  Thanks, E. T., this is really the help we needed--what's next, airdropping pallets of cash to Tehran?  And, you know, I can't tell if Eve is suffering from postpartum depression, so our odds may be even worse than they appear.  This book looks a little silly, its plot like that of a mainstream melodrama, its point likely that the commies are no worse than us decadent capitalists.  A few moments on wikipedia suggests John Mantley's career was focused largely on the dramatic arts; he apparently is to blame for the second season of Gil Gerard's Buck Rogers.  Don't bet any money on my reading The 27th Day any time soon. 

Finally, another book I brought home (from a flea market, maybe) for its Powers cover, Charles Eric Maine's High Vacuum.  I read Maine's He Owned the World back in 2018, and it is good I blogged about it, because I don't remember a thing about it.  High Vacuum sounds like it is about being trapped in space or on Luna or something, which sounds fun, so maybe I'll read this one, enjoy it, blog abut it, and then forget about it.

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There they are, some recent bargains, some of which we may be hearing more about in the future.  If I buy enough stuff, maybe we'll do this again in November.