This month wasn’t too crazy. Sometimes you gotta slow it down to a cool 35mph. Not quite a residential zone but still you don’t want to be running over any kids playing in the street.
Our first haul and honestly the best was when we went to Columbus and accidentally discovered Karen Wickliff bookstore. I did a bookstore spotlight on that so I’m not going to go in depth here, but you should swing back four blog posts and check it out. It’s a vintage book paradise.
As soon as we walked in, not a few feet, was that Monsters and Nightmares anthology randomly sitting on top of a leaning tower of books. Underneath was the gothic, Witch of Goblin’s Acres. Right away this had me itching to find the actual genre paperbacks section. Tucked away in the back was the motherload. As you are walking down the little hall to get to said room there are literal piles of paperbacks stacked four feet high on both sides of you. You are enveloped in the smell of old paper all around you. I inaccurately figured these to be the less sought after overstock, but they weren’t at all. It was more stacks of great books that wouldn’t fit into the room.
There was a sub-section of boats stories, which for some reason I had been wanting to read lately. I picked up a buffet plate of boat noir, pirate sleeze, submarine war and even jumped up to the air with plane war. Just look at that cover of Skip Bomber. I’ve never read a war novel but after testing the waters of other pulpy sub-genres and finding I really enjoyed them I’m interested to see what else is out there.
There wasn’t “too much horror fiction” (nod), but I did find some; that ghostly Tor- Platforms, Children of the Shrouds, Great Mischief-satanic witchery, movie novelization of What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice and Michael McDowell’s Blackwater 5. Now I’m only missing 1 and 6 and I can start the damn thing. I’ve only heard rave reviews about it. Also got some horror/mystery crossover with that very intriguing looking Dr Nikola Returns. That one is trade paperback size. It looks to be a Sherlock Holmes of the Occult. And of course, some Dennis Wheatley. They look like horror, but I think they are actually murder mysteries. Either way, beautiful covers.
My wife picked up some obscure non-fiction Occult books, most notable, Witchcraft in England and that Mexican Ghost Tales of the Southwest which has some excellent spooky artwork inside the pages.
It wouldn’t be a haul without a grip of some crime. Usually this is the bulk of my finds as they are most common in the wild (and cheapest!), but this go around there was so much different stuff that I only pulled a few. Two hardboiled crimes- The Fix and Johnny Bingo, two spies- Green Hazard and Russian Roulette, a mafia- The Payoff and a classic- Ten Little Indians. I’ve always wanted to read Ten Little Indians; this was only a dollar, and I liked the cover. It’s one of my favorite movies to fall asleep to. Except that part where that guy sings the song. I always skip that part ha.
And I had to get some cheesy Men’s Adventure. I love the ridiculous Hawk Series. It’s so bad it’s good. I found some very 70’s looking Starshine Connection and Corpses in the Cellar. And man, oh man was I excited to get that Black Samurai. Just look at that thing!
A couple weeks later I had to drop off some shirts to a client (I own a screen print business btw, if you need shirts) and we were near Yellow Springs, so we made a relaxing backroads country drive to the little hippy town to visit Dark Star.
After spending so much money in Columbus, we dialed it back quite a bit. Here my wife found me one of the COOLEST looking books, The Fantasy Reader. The front cover blurb says, “The most terrifying tales of horror and swashbuckling adventure ever written!” I’ve been dying to read a Robert E Howard horror story, one of the few genres he wrote that I’ve yet to get my hands on, so I’m hoping this is one of them. The anthology also includes stories from Manly Wade Wellman, CL Moore, Thorp McClusky, Niictzin Dyalhis, Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson. Also, horror-wise I picked The Black Castle- it looks very classic horror to me- like it should have Boris Karloff’s face on the cover and even though it looks like non-fiction- Curse of the Pharoahs- a horror fiction novel about the finding and opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb.
Since I’m going boat genre crazy I picked up some more boat noir with Fog and two private eye’s- Drowning Pool and The Saint on the Spanish Main both also centered around boats.
And lastly I grabbed a book purely on the oddness of the cover artwork and publisher. Nothing But Blood. Take a close look at the painting on the cover. The proportions are so odd. I’m entranced with trying to figure out what the hell is going on with her body. Everything about it is impossible. The publisher, “Chicago Paperback House was an offshoot of a soft‐core porn imprint called Newsstand Library, which ran from 1959 to 1962.”- random PDF I found online copywritten by Kenneth R Johnson.
For our last stop of the month, we stopped by the usually non-exciting but always lucrative 2nd and Charles. We walked in and saw bright orange signs advertising that if you buy 5 fiction books, you get 5 for free. Well, well, well.
I picked up a bunch I had been wanting but didn’t want to pay full price for. I grabbed all of the Loren D Estleman’s they had and the remaining two Lawrence Block Avon editions that I had been putting off because the covers weren’t that cool. Upon further inspection, one of those lack luster covers was actually a sticker that said, Autographed Copy. Well, hell yeah I want a Lawrence Block autographed copy. Is it real? I googled it and it looks legit to me. I also picked up some other random crime books, Booked to Die- a mystery involving book collectors and Bitter Medicine a hospital crime setting.
We got a fantasy anthology hardcover- Flashing Swords #4 with Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, John Jakes, Katherine Kurtz and Michael Moorcock. And then two sword and sorcery looking books- Ambush Planet and The Sorcerers Shadow. For sci-fi I got a Laser Book- the Horde, Froomb and Retief to the Rescue. A novelization of the James Bond movie Moonraker. It’s funny when they make a novelization of a movie based on a book. The Maharajah is a collection of stories by Author TH White dating back to the pulps including various genres from fantasy and sci-fi to horror. To fill out my required 5 books I also picked up the ridiculous looking Chopper Cops and a Zebra Horror vampire book- Night Blood.
Pretty good month and not too much spent. Finding that Karen Wickliff books in Columbus was by far the best thing. I can’t wait to go back. We didn’t even get a chance to look at everything. There was so much.
Oh, also worth mentioning I found this new printing collection of Victorian era Werewolf stories put out by Valancourt at a bookstore in Columbus called The Book Loft. They only carry new books, so it was massively disappointing. It’s also an insane clusterfuck maze of a store. We showed up on a Saturday and there was a line to get in. It was surreal. I absolutely hated it BUT they did carry a lot of new independent publishers so that’s cool. They had a bright orange sticker on EVERY book that say’s “5% off.” HAHA! WHAT?! They went through the time and effort of labeling every book in the entire fucking store with a sticker advertising only 5 percent off. That’s less than the sales tax. My mind was blown. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in a bookstore. They could have set aside the money they spent on the stickers and the labor to put them on every book and put it towards ten percent off and made one sign in the front of the store saying, “everything 10% off.”
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