For me 1977 was a great time to up my game as a serious reader of science fiction. I was 16 that year and in the summer left school for my first job. I considered myself rich at £96 per month. I was living at home and had few expenses after I had paid my father for ‘board and lodging’. The remainder of the money I earned was my own to spend. And because in those days saving towards a pension never entered my mind, most of my free cash went on science fiction.
In retrospect, many factors seem to have come together around the same time. London was an hour away by train; I was used to ‘going up’ on Saturdays. Instead of wandering the streets around the West End or the South Kensington museums I would first head straight to my favourite recent discovery, Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed – a large bookshop up an alley in Soho devoted entirely to science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Those afternoons of browsing and buying banished the routine and mundane.
Crucially, too, as well as new paperback fiction and magazines, Dark They Were stocked books about sf. At the same time as having the chance to examine and buy sf in considerable quantity and variety, I was introduced to the history of the genre and the work of those who illustrated it. Numerous books of sf art and heavily-illustrated histories and surveys of the genre were being published in those days. I found Brian Aldiss’ Science Fiction Art (1975, slim but wide-ranging – and huge in height and breadth) and Fantastic Science-Fiction Art 1926-1954 (1975) by Lester del Rey. Both compilations concentrated on the cover art of sf magazines (although Aldiss’ included much interior artwork too). I bought the first volume of Mike Ashley’s The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, newly published in paperback (still extremely useful, and the thoroughly revised version from 2000 is surely definitive). I was swept into the world of the American pulp magazines, and especially Hugo Gernsback and his magazine Amazing Stories – the first issue of which appeared in early March 1926, dated April.
I had also found that Dark There Were kept a shelf or two of second-hand sf magazines, which I knew about from the books on sf art. On those shelves I found copies of The British Science Fiction Magazine (with its proclamation inside that the contents were ‘ALL BRITISH’). This was edited by ‘Vargo Statten’ and featured much work by him and ‘Volsted Gridban’. Because I had started to read about the history of sf at the same time as immersing myself in the product it wasn’t long before my incredulity concerning the child-naming policies of the parents of Messrs Statten and Gridban was vindicated by the knowledge that both were house names created by the publishers, and used by two other prolific contributors to the magazine. Vargo Statten was John Russell Fearn (1908-60), while Volsted Gridban was almost exclusively E.C. Tubb (1919-2010) – both also authors of many paperback novels which were extensively promoted in the magazine. I bought the February 1964 issue of the aristocratic large-size Analog which had an almost serene (considering what was happening in the story it illustrated) cover by John Schoenherr. And there was an issue of Amazing Stories from August 1939, which seemed an artifact out of deep time, although it was still less than 40 years old – something that a magazine from 1988 or so could never feel like, to me, now.
It was something else to see for myself the magazines I had only previously read about, to be able to make them my own, to open and read them – and sniff them! To inhale the smell of old sf magazines was to invoke, as it still does, a past time that stands comparison with M. Proust and his tea-soaked cake. Time can briefly be regained. Those magazines with their gaudy wonder-filled covers and interior illustrations smeared across their brittle pages gripped me with a nostalgia for something that I had never known or experienced – and which I now know will remain out of reach, except during exceptional, almost sacramental moments. Those old pages (always growing older) continue to induce a homesickness, a form of Sehnsucht, for those times of my own when all this was new, unsullied, to be experienced for the first time.
After I had visited Dark They Were I would often stroll on to Soho Square and, if the weather permitted, sit on a bench in the gardens and browse through my purchases and perhaps read a story from one of the collections or anthologies. I don’t recall that I ever inhaled ‘pulp’ in public!
It was later the same autumn that I discovered the Vintage Magazine Shop – I’m sure that was its name as well as its business. It was just off Cambridge Circus, not very far from Soho Square. There were now two sources of old sf magazines. My recollection is of magazines of all kinds and ages piled haphazardly on tables and the floor – you just had to sort through them to find what you wanted. There was an upstairs room too. I found a couple of issues of Science Fantasy from the early 1950s, and excavated issues of the British Reprint Editions of Amazing Stories, Dynamic Science Fiction, Fantastic Adventures, and Thrilling Wonder Stories from the same era. There was the May 1933 issue of Wonder Stories which included stories by two writers I was already reading, Clark Ashton Smith and John Beynon Harris – who I knew had re-invented himself as John Wyndham. And from somewhere in the shop a proper American issue of Amazing, one from the period of a few months in 1933 when the magazine had a new Art Deco logo and featured modernistic poster-like covers by ‘Sigmond’. (I now longer have that copy, which I have since identified as the February issue.) Then one afternoon the door wouldn’t open. I stepped back and realised the shop was closed. Gazing through the dusty window I saw that the place was empty. It had been stripped bare.
(John Howard)
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