I’ve never had much luck finding books at antique malls, although I always look every time I happen to find myself in one. Anything I find that I’m interested in is usually priced at least twice what I think it’s worth, and often three or four times what it’s worth. Today while running some other errands, we stopped at the local antique mall to look for a small desk for one of our daughters. We found one we liked pretty quickly but of course had to wander through the rest of the mall as well. I found a cabinet full of old sheet music and magazines and started pawing through it, not really expecting to find anything. Then, suddenly, on the spine of a magazine, I saw the magic word.
Spicy.
Naturally, I pounced and started digging harder through all the stuff clogging the shelves. I was rewarded with not one but two issues of the pulp SPICY ADVENTURE STORIES, from November 1937 and April 1939. The ’37 issue is actually in very nice shape except the top two inches of the front cover is gone, telling me that it’s a copy that was stripped by the distributor ‘way back when. It includes at least two stories by Robert Leslie Bellem, one under his own name and one under the pseudonym Jerome Severs Perry, as well as stories by E. Hoffmann Price and Lew Merrill (Victor Rousseau). The issue from ’39 is also a stripped copy but is more beat up. The scan accompanying this post is from the Fictionmags Index, not the actual issue I found. Still, it appears to be complete and perfectly readable. Bellem is in this one, too, along with Lew Merrill. They were priced at a dollar each. I wish the whole cabinet had been full of them at that price. I’d have bought ’em all. As it is, I came home with these two and was very happy about it.
I found some other good stuff, too, including several Whitman juvenile novels featuring Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. They were ridiculously overpriced, so they stayed right where they were and didn’t come home with me. I probably already read them when I was a kid, anyway.
Spicy.
Naturally, I pounced and started digging harder through all the stuff clogging the shelves. I was rewarded with not one but two issues of the pulp SPICY ADVENTURE STORIES, from November 1937 and April 1939. The ’37 issue is actually in very nice shape except the top two inches of the front cover is gone, telling me that it’s a copy that was stripped by the distributor ‘way back when. It includes at least two stories by Robert Leslie Bellem, one under his own name and one under the pseudonym Jerome Severs Perry, as well as stories by E. Hoffmann Price and Lew Merrill (Victor Rousseau). The issue from ’39 is also a stripped copy but is more beat up. The scan accompanying this post is from the Fictionmags Index, not the actual issue I found. Still, it appears to be complete and perfectly readable. Bellem is in this one, too, along with Lew Merrill. They were priced at a dollar each. I wish the whole cabinet had been full of them at that price. I’d have bought ’em all. As it is, I came home with these two and was very happy about it.
I found some other good stuff, too, including several Whitman juvenile novels featuring Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. They were ridiculously overpriced, so they stayed right where they were and didn’t come home with me. I probably already read them when I was a kid, anyway.
1 comment:
A couple years ago I took some spicies that belonged to a friend down to Pulpcon to sell. Since I knew nothing about the price of spicies or how to grade them, I asked a friend, dealer and spicy expert, Doug Ellis, if he'd price them for me. There were 10-12 issues in all. Doug divided them into piles -- $100, $125, $50 for one really beat up copy. Someone saw Doug doing this and when Doug was done said, "I'll take 'em."
For you to find a couple spicies for a buck each .... that was a good day.
By the by, the captcha image below defies reading.
Brian Earl Brown
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