Authentic Memories (Part 1) - A Guest Post by John Howard

Authentic Memories 1: ‘All hail to the future!’

Throughout the spring and summer of 1978 I continued to make my regular Saturday trips ‘up’ to London. I was working at a builders’ and plumbers’ merchants, and sometimes had to work Saturday mornings on the trade counter, so wouldn’t get to the railway station until about one o’clock. An hour or so later I would be hurrying out of Marylebone Station, which was still rather shabby and dim in those days, intent on spending most of my hard-earned wages on science fiction. My routine was to visit Dark They Were and Golden Eyed, a bookshop devoted solely to sf, fantasy, and horror hidden in plain sight along an alley in Soho, and then the Vintage Magazine Shop nearby, before going on to South Kensington or staying in the area for further wanderings around Soho, Bloomsbury, threading eastwards towards the City. It was on one of these Saturdays in the Vintage Magazine Shop that I first encountered Authentic Science Fiction. I was to find three issues there.

The first issue was No. 41, dated January 1954. Authentic was smaller and thicker than any sf magazine I had seen before. Closer in size to a pocketbook or paperback than a digest magazine, it was published by Hamilton & Co., who in numerous adverts also announced themselves as the publishers of Panther Books – an imprint then still in existence, familiar from the shelves of W.H. Smith’s and other places where I bought my doses of science fiction.

The cover featured a spaceship shaped like a dumb-bell newly landed on a bleak planet, with two space-suited figures cautiously making their way up a rocky slope towards the viewer. Unusually, the painting was captioned: ‘WE LAND ON PHOBOS – ARID MOON OF MARS!’ Text on the back cover explained. ‘This month’s cover is the seventh in our new series of documentary paintings and depicts the scene of man’s first landing beyond the Moon….’ They had taken off without me, and I had to catch up – 24 years late – and embark on a voyage FROM EARTH TO THE STARS! The artwork was credited to ‘Davis’ – who I later found was John Richards, the Art Editor of Authentic and later a notable paperback cover artist in his own right, especially for Corgi Books.

Authentic was different to the other British sf magazines I already knew – and not only in its format. For a start, it was published on a firm monthly schedule, in contrast to Nova Publications’ magazines New Worlds and Science Fantasy, which at that time appeared irregularly. As well as short stories Authentic featured what it proclaimed to be a ‘novel’ – in reality usually a novelette. There were short scientific articles, a section on fanzines, and a lively no holds barred letter column. And editorials by one H.J. Campbell. Comparing Authentic with New Worlds I preferred Campbell’s magazine to John Carnell’s more staid and earnest product. Authentic had what I felt were superior artwork and higher production quality – hardly surprising as the product of a commercial publisher instead of the fan-led consortium as Nova was then. But most appealing of all was the personal atmosphere: the feeling that Campbell was talking to me as a fellow reader and fan, discussing the magazine and its contents on a one-to-one basis. Authentic seemed – well, more ‘authentic’.

The next issue I found, deep in one of the piles of magazines on a shelf or the floor, was the first, which I later discovered had been released in January 1951. This was a very different Authentic to that which it had developed into forty issues later – and not really a magazine at all. I held a fragile paperback, battered and scruffy, entitled Mushroom Men from Mars. The author was ‘Lee Stanton’. The cover attempted to be lurid and sensational, but was too faded or just too crude to get that far. A strip along the foot of the cover announced ‘Authentic Science Fiction Series’. There was no editorial or any other features. Clearly many changes were to be in store for Authentic – and I wanted to find out what happened. I needed to search out more issues…

In the meantime, though, I found a third: No. 55, dated March 1955. The logo had changed, and emphasised the ‘Science’ in Authentic Science Fiction. There was still a longish feature story and several short stories, but the number of scientific articles had increased. It seemed to me that H.J. Campbell was attempting to turn Authentic into a popular science magazine – perhaps reflecting his developing career and changing interests. Hints dropped in his editorials led to the conclusion that he was a scientist still gaining his higher degrees and professional memberships. Yet at the same time he was an sf fan who wrote and edited the stuff. Campbell had two parallel careers; perhaps he had wished to concentrate on the purely scientific one, while continuing to combine it with his editorial work.

The cover by John Richards depicted a huge delta-winged aircraft flying over a great city of white buildings. Inside, the descriptive text, surely by Campbell, rhapsodised: ‘[...] Surrounded by light, airy spacious buildings – no more crowded dwellings – the airport will be as busy as a present-day train terminus. […] And there will  be no passport and immigration troubles. In the enlightened future, all countries will be free and untrammelled by the strings of petty bureaucracies… […] Down with the pessimists! The world of the future will be a gay, enchanting place, where the spirit of the people will match the spirit of the age… […] Work will be what you want to do. […] There will be colour and music and a fine rare mood of content. All hail to the future! You’ll see it on our covers.’

These were heartfelt predictions by a man of 1955 who had grown up in London during World War II and in the aftermath seen the first glimmerings of a new order with its limitless possibilities, symbolised by the foundation of the United Nations and the prospect of limitless and clean power through atomic energy. In the UK the National Health Service had been established; bombed cities were being rebuilt and whole new towns planned and under construction. The Festival of Britain had illustrated, in microcosm, a heady vision of the future. During 1954 all rationing had finally ended. Insecurity and austerity would soon be  banished to memory.

But of course even in 1955 someone would have been particularly optimistic – ignoring the facts and weaving a dream – not to know and be worried at the direction the world had taken as post-war idealism waned over the previous decade. Nevertheless, Campbell made his wishes. The cover for the March 1955 Authentic was a glimpse into a future that I knew, even in 1978, was not going to arrive. That world had been almost completely lost; stolen and betrayed.

(John Howard) 

 

Ghosts & Scholars 50 - The Final Issue

  

The final issue of the long-running M.R. James journal Ghosts & Scholars, no 50, has recently been published. Edited by Rosemary Pardoe and Andy Sawyer, this is an extra large issue, at 60pp.

Ghosts & Scholars was founded in 1979 by Rosemary, who edited it for 33 issues between 1979 – 2001. It was replaced by her The Ghosts & Scholars M. R. James Newsletter, which was similar, but generally excluded fiction. This also ran for 33 issues from March 2002 to April 2018. Ghosts & Scholars then resumed from October 2018 (no 34), still edited by Rosemary Pardoe, and it then continued under her guidance but with guest editors or co-editors from no 38 onwards.

The farewell issue includes cover artwork by Jim Pitts and Daniel McGachey, stories by Katherine Haynes, Helen Grant, Daniel McGachey, C.J. Faraday and Josh Reynolds, a poetic tribute by Tina Rath, and non-fiction by Jim Bryant, Rick Kennett, Michael Fogus, John Howard and the editors, along with seven pages of reviews. This issue is limited to 250 copies.

All subscriber copies have been posted. Copies of this issue and of some back issues may be available from Andy Richards at Cold Tonnage Books.

A Telephone Box Library: A Guest Post by R.B. Russell

In the 1980s and 1990s many communities struggled to retain their red telephone boxes as British Telecom did their best to replace them with modern glass and steel booths. Those that survived are now seen as a part of the historic landscape, but very few now have telephones inside. The box in our village does because we have no reliable mobile phone signal, but in neighbouring Melmerby the box has been converted into a community library.

Of course, it is not a proper library with computers, dvd players, specialist support services, and areas set aside for a range of community groups, with cheerful librarians failing to get to grips with barcode scanners. No, this is a library with shelves of books, albeit one that holds less than a hundred, and into which only one person can enter at a time. The Melmerby phone box library is an heroically archaic idea, but it is cramped, so if you have brought the wrong glasses with you, you can’t take a step back to read the spines of the books.

When I visited earlier today, the shelves were the usual mix that would cause any professional librarian to have a panic attack. With a casual disregard of the Dewey Decimal System, there were cookery books, religious texts, self-help manuals, thrillers and romances, many of which seemed to have survived at least two divorces, a fire and a flood. In its time, the shelves have been tainted by the various hagiographies of the now discredited Lance Armstrong, and the less than literary works of Russell Brand and Jordan. But I am not a complete snob; I was delighted to see there were still books by Barbara Taylor Bradford, James Clavell and Jane Fonda.

I know our neighbour Edgar uses the phone box library; he recently donated several novels that had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. This struck me as both generous and faintly intimidating. I half suspect he also slipped in an early printing of Richard Powers’s The Overstory as well, a book so big each copy must account for a tree in itself. It was next to a colossal fantasy novel by Chaz Brenchley that occupied most of a shelf by itself, the way a large cat can monopolise an armchair. It seems to be smugly aware that it was even bigger than The Overstory, even if it never had the same critical reception, or sold as well. Somehow, I am sure this wasn’t donated by Edgar.

Local people obviously supply the telephone box library, although I suspect that holidaymakers in the area probably contribute to the stock. People arrive for a week with three novels, read half of one during a rainstorm, and then deposit the remainder in the telephone box as though it were a literary compost heap. Last year, I discovered a small, old, French-language edition of The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet, and at first I was rather struck by the idea that such a book had travelled all the way to a village phone box in the Dales. Then I realised that if it had been left by a French tourist, they had decided they couldn’t be bothered to take it back home with them.

The lack of order in the phone box is a part of the charm. Immediately inside the door there are three books shelved with the look of people forced, unwillingly to share a bus seat. I am intrigued by how a book on the Bhagavad-Gita and another on the Lost Art of Scripture can have a slim volume entitled The Sacred Neuron shelved in between them. The arrangement made me feel as though I had stumbled into a Radio Four debate. Very close to these, on the same shelf, were three Colin Forbes novels. Someone had bound them together in string with a note in careful handwriting attached:

 

Old Books but a very good read. Enjoy x

I appreciate the optimism of the ‘x’. It suggests the writer believes the next reader may be a close friend rather than, say, a wet walker seeking shelter. However, what that wet walker might really need is at least one good thriller to pass a few hours until the rain stops.

Right beside the Forbes novels sits Sartre’s Iron in the Soul trilogy, which has not been tied with string nor endorsed with affectionate punctuation. No one has written: 

Very cheerful read. Enjoy x

Elsewhere, the juxtapositions become more surreal: Terry Wogan’s autobiography leans companionably against The Gardening Year, and next on the shelf, like a guest nobody quite remembers inviting, is a well-thumbed copy of Foucault’s Pendulum. The three books together create a small cultural sandwich: Irish broadcasting legend, seasonal horticultural advice, and a 600-page Italian conspiracy novel which may or may not be a comedy.

Then there is the science-fiction section, which appears to consist of exactly one Star Wars omnibus placed next to a book called Fleeing Isis. I don’t know if this is deliberate or if the phone box simply has an ‘all rebellions welcome’ policy.

While browsing I was alone, though not unobserved. A tractor passed slowly along the road, its driver giving me the sort of look usually reserved for people who might be up to no good. More unsettling were the cows in the adjacent field; they gathered along the stone wall and watched me with quiet interest, as though waiting to see if I would give them access to this literary cornucopia.

I have contributed to the phone box myself. Some years ago I placed several Tartarus Press volumes inside, feeling momentarily noble. Unfortunately winter arrived, bringing with it the sort of damp that used to make traditional telephone directories bloat. Tartarus dust jackets are not laminated, so when I returned a month later, they had begun to develop delicate constellations of furry mould.

I also left a copy of my own magnum opus Fifty Forgotten Books. I was pleased to see that it was soon snapped up, and I was feeling quite pleased with myself, not that telephone box library loans mean I can claim anything from the Public Lending Rights office. I like to think that Fifty Forgotten Books ought to be a book anyone would want to keep, but I later noticed the borrower felt obliged to return it.

Of course, I haunt the telephone box library, because, occasionally, treasures do appear. I found novels by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Coupland, there, a great book on The Craft of Literary Biography, and quite a few Peanuts paperbacks. My most recent discovery was a copy of Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent. I read it with a growing appreciation of the author’s craft until I reached the final scene, which was so startlingly bad that I had to check whether the last page had been replaced by a substitute from the novelisation of a 1980s James Bond film starring Roger Moore.

What I like most about the Melmerby telephone box library is that every book in it raises questions about who donated the books, and why? Was my game-dealing neighbour once a fan of Penny Vincenzi? Did the farmer who lives opposite us enjoy origami? Of course, as with The Devil in the Flesh, I have to ask these questions in the past tense because they are obviously no longer wanted. But, who, locally, thought anybody else would be interested in a 1970s Pontefract bus timetable?

Red telephone boxes were once as indispensible as we now regard mobile phones and the internet, but today the box in Melmerby has another role. It hosts strange negotiations between readers who might only ever meet by chance: the cook who trades a book of casserole recipes for Sartre, the French holidaymaker who abandons a classic of their own literature for the biography of Terry Wogan, the mysterious person who ties together three Colin Forbes novels like a literary bouquet.

You step inside for a moment, browse a little while the cows watch and tractors pass, and the discoloured Perspex of the windows rattle with the passing shower . . . and you leave with something unexpected. It is, in its own small way, the most perfect library imaginable.

(R.B. Russell)