October Antiques Sightings

The wife and I went to antiques stores in the Altoona-Tyrone region of the Keystone State and today I will share images of some of the wild and crazy stuff I saw that I was too cheap to buy, artifacts of the past that I think may be of interest to fans of genre literature, old magazines, comics, and collectible paperbacks.  We'll start with the tame stuff and work our way to the most exploitative, salacious and perverted items.

Click on the images for larger versions.

Here's something wholesome for you vinyl enthusiasts, a record with four new Star Trek adventures, three of them written by Alan Dean Foster.  You can listen to at least some of these stories on YouTube; here's a link to "The Time Stealer" by Cary Bates and Neal Adams and a link to Foster's "Mirror of Futility;" I think all four of them are available at the internet archive at this link.  

Speaking of vinyl, there were a lot of Yes and Yes-related albums at the New Arrivals section of a booth selling records--I'm afraid a prog fan has just sailed to Avalon and his mercenary inheritors made a fast buck.  MPorcius Fiction Log can recommend Side One of Chris Squire's Fish Out of Water; the first song on Side Two I also like, but I find the long final song on the album to be a snoozer, even though I'm the kind of guy who loves "The Atom Heart Mother Suite" and "Flight."

For devotees of cinema and the boob tube we have a (German?) poster for Tarzan the Magnificent and a Space: 1999 lunchbox.

Here we have three science fiction paperbacks whose covers I thought noteworthy.  Genus Homo's cover is by Richard Powers and that of Seed of Stars is by Vincent Di Fate; isfdb doesn't know who did the cover of Marooned on Mars.  There may be a signature in the lower right corner, but I can't get anything much out of it; as for the style, I guess it is reminiscent of Jack Gaughan or John Schoenherr?  Any guesses from commenters, and of course opinions on whether any of these books is worth reading, are welcome.

I spotted a horror comic I'd never seen before, Shock.  Being locked within a glass case, I couldn't get a good look at it without overcoming my reluctance to talk to a clerk, but the cover, showing a woman being disrobed by oversized amphibians and offering text promising "weird adventures from the depths of hell" was certainly alluring.  A look at the Grand Comics Database, however, suggests the 1969 issue under discussion is mostly reprints of 1950s comics written and drawn by people whose names are lost to history.  Oh, well. 

Here we have a paperback collection of cartoons by Peter Arno.  I guess this guy is famous for doing covers of famously snooty magazine The New Yorker, but many of the cartoons in this book seem to revolve around men's lust for women's bodies, and wikipedia suggests he loved guns and fast cars and "often worked with gag writers."  I couldn't find a scan of The New Peter Arno Pocket Book online in the brief period I allotted to the task, but you can check out scans of Peter Arno's Sizzling Platter and Peter Arno's Hullaballoo if you want to get an idea of what this guy's work is all about.  I guess I kind of like the cartoons, but Arno's entire oeuvre seems like a pleasant trifle--it takes like 3 minutes to read a whole book of these cartoons, and none of the jokes makes you laugh out loud, and none of the nudity, it being so cartoony, is sexually arousing.

Here's something that actually does have some erotic power, an item the asking price of which is $2,800!  Kaboom!  Purportedly, this is an original work by Austrian artist Raphael Kirchner, created over 100 years ago.  I think this image is pretty good; the colors and the composition of the female figure are quite successful.  However, the face of the bear looks messed up in a way that is distracting, like the perspective is off, like the upper jaw and lower jaw have been foreshortened in different ways.  Too bad.

At WikiArt you can look at over 500 images by Kirchner; if you are interested in Art Nouveau or pin-up art it is worth your time to flip through them.         

Alright, now we've really reached the parental-guidance-is-suggested section of today's blog post, two sex novels, Smoldering Women by Burton St. John and Lust Addict by Olivia Rangeley.  The former seems to be about a woman who thinks her daughters have sexual problems, so she hires a doctor to cure them by having sex with them.  Smoldering Women presents itself as more than porn, as an examination of the philosophical issue of what actually constitutes a normal and an abnormal psychology, I guess a sort of one-handed take on the thinking of Thomas Szasz.  Lust Addict seems to be unabashed porn, the story of a woman who is so horny she has a wide variety of sexual experiences--the back cover includes an excerpt of a scene of rough heterosexual sex and hints there is also plenty of lesbian sex in the novel.  The cover image and design of Smoldering Women betrays some level of effort, even sophistication, while Lust Addict is crude and amateurish, kind of icky. 

Finally, our most disturbing and exploitative item, an issue of Master Detective which bears a sexualized violence against women cover photo and promotes as its top story the tale of the sexual torture of a child.  Gross!

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There's plenty of exciting finds at the antique stores and flea markets of the East Coast, including bargains that even a man as cheap as myself cannot pass up.  Maybe later this month I'll post about some of the items I have actually seen fit to purchase up in Altoona (or was it Duncansville?) and elsewhere in the last few weeks.