Finally Found a Book I saw Ages Ago

When I was a kid, I noticed that my friend’s father had a book out on a table. It had a picture on the cover of men riding dinosaurs – brontosauruses (apatosaurs to you pedants), just like in the movie Dinosaurus

http://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view;_ylt=A0PDoYDtk3tPsnAAE7CJzbkF;_ylu=X3oDMTBlMTQ4cGxyBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDaW1n?back=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fsearch%2Fimages%3F_adv_prop%3Dimage%26va%3Ddinosaurus%2B1960%2Bmovie%26fr%3Dyfp-t-701%26tab%3Dorganic%26ri%3D7&w=500&h=393&imgurl=www.pictorialpress.com%2Fphoto%2Fgen%2F500%2F001-050949.jpg&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pictorialpress.com%2Fentry%2Fdinosaurus1%3Fgal%3D%2FThemes%26amp%3Bpage%3D13&size=194.8+KB&name=1960-dinosaur-dinosaurus&p=dinosaurus+1960+movie&oid=3d170866e77a66f70b314ecd3e30746b&fr2=&fr=yfp-t-701&tt=1960-dinosaur-dinosaurus&b=0&ni=72&no=7&tab=organic&ts=&sigr=127t3ngs1&sigb=13jnlurs6&sigi=11jqtfsm3&.crumb=2epaa/PH1xS
I was too young to read, but I was surprised that an adult would be reading something like this. For years I wondered about that book. In all my years of reading and perusing science fiction, I never saw it again.
Until this weekend. I stumbled across a copy in a used book store, and my heart stopped. Here it is:

No wonder I hadn’t seen it – it wasn’t a book, but a magazine. an issue of *Analog Science Fact and Fiction * from February of 1961. Of course, I picked it up. I’ve been curious about that story for all these years. And it was a Campbell-edited issue, so i’d get to read one of his editorials, too.
The story turns out to be Everett B. Cole’s The Weakling. I looked up Cole in my copies of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. I hadn’t read any of his other stuff. according to the Internet Speculative Fiction database, this story wasn’t reprinted until 2009, when Project Gutenberg posted it:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?55508

I have to admit that I was severely disappointed. The brontosaurs are incredible peripheral to the story. In fact, you could remove them completely and substitute som other bit of local color (they don’t even qualify as a McGuffin). Furthermore, if I hadn’t seen the cover and the internal illustrations, I could easily visualize them as something else entirely. The descriptions call them “saurians” and “longnecks”, , but, given how vague the setting is (it might be the world of long ago, or an alternate time line, or some far-off planet. The setting is maddeningly vague, as are the technical details. And this is a “stand-alone” story, so I can’t blame it on my unfamiliarity with any series), these could have been any lizardlike creatures with long necks, and don’t have to resemble our sauropods at all.
I have a strong suspicion that Campbell had the cover painting by d von Dongen all made up already, with its Charles Knight-copied* brontosaur:

,and he needed a story to go with it. So he asked Cole to cobble one together. Cole quickly threw this together, maybe even simply doing a rewrite on an existing story he wanted to get in print, just sothat it had enough Pack Dinosaurs to satisfy the need to fit in with the cover.

In any case, I’m still glad I picked it up and satisfied that decades-old itch. The editorial’s typically Campbellian interesting – “On the Selective Breeding of Human Beings”.

*That’s the brontosaurs from the painting he did for the Ameriocan Museum of Natural History. The pterosaurs and background look as if they’ve been scarfed from the Yale Peabody Museum mural, though:
http://peabody.yale.edu/exhibits/age-reptiles-mural

Bump, to see if there’s any reply.

When you described the cover, I thought you were going to be talking about “Dinotopia” there for a moment

I was half expecting to see Mick Farren’s Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys.

You two are SO much younger than I am.
When I sawthe magazine on the stand, it was brand new. Dinotopia and Dinoriders and Devil Dinosaur and all those other depictions were far in the future. Aside from Dinosaurus and depictions of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ land of Pal-ul-Don (from the Tarzan books, with their gryf-riders), dinosaur riders were few and far between.

I’m roughly Cal’s age and for us “Dinotopia” came out last week. not 1992. And we’re pretty sure John W. Campbell is still alive.