So I buy this old house in Marietta, OH. 100 year old place.
I’m having some wiring and new AC put in (to make danceswithcats feel better) and I’m poking around in the attic and I come across two large cardboard boxes behind some old panelling…
“What ho?”, I cry, “What treasure awaits?”
Magazines.
Digest-sized magazines.
I just grabbed a handful and brought them down to my office.
They’re old SF magazines from the 50s through the 70s (so far). There must be a couple of hundred.
I just grabbed five from the top to list them.
Galaxy - September 1972. Cover text: “Rendezvous with Rama - Pre-publication scoop!” Analog - March 1972. Cover text: “The Fold at the Starbow’s End - Frederick Pohl” Worlds of If - October 1971. Cover text: “Big new Retief Novel, complete in this issue! THE ALTOGETHER PLANET by Keith Laumer” Worlds of If - December 1971. Cover text: “The Real People - J. T. McIntosh” Worlds of If - August 1971. Cover Text: “Occam’s Scalpel by Theodore Sturgeon”
It looks like mostly ‘Worlds of If’ and ‘Galaxy’ with a bunch of oddballs thrown in going farther back.
Hmmm. If the Galaxies go through 1975, I have the lead story in one.
Clever in a juvenile sort of way.
Galaxy really started to go downhill around that point. (Not my fault: they had just merged it with Worlds of If and stopped paying authors). Up until 1975, say from 1962 through 1973, was a second golden age of the sf magazines. You’ve got some good stuff there. Nice find.
We bought my grandparents’ house. It needed (and still needs) a lot of renovation. But my grandmother included my grandfather’s collection of books and magazines in the sale. My husband, who is not a reader, did some work on the house while I was away on a trip…
I come back to find that he’s thrown out the ENTIRE collection of Galaxy and Playboy. The Galaxy was a COMPLETE run, and the Playboy was a run from the very first issue to sometime in the mid 70s. He threw out a bunch of books and other magazines, too. I came home to find these boxes of books and magazines standing out in the rain, thoroughly soaked. Once books and magazines are that well soaked, they are less than worthless, as they WILL mildew and contaminate other items.
I still might kill him. If I do, I want all of you to be my witnesses that it was justifiable.
There’s twenty bucks in it for you, plus my paying for shipping and handling – if you have the April 1957 issue of Super-Science Fiction magazine with an intact copy of Harlan Ellison’s short story “Invulnerable” (a Superman/Krypto pastiche). I have been dying to read that thing since I was 17.
Well it’s your own damn fault for marrying him then!
[sub]waits with trepidation to be banned posthaste ;)[/sub]
Ah, just tell him that 10 issues of the 1958 run of Galaxy magazine are selling on eBay for $35…
I’ll buy all the issues of Analog/Astounding. Send me a list of what you’ve got and we’ll negotiate a price. I’ll also buy any issues of Interzone, although the stuff you have is apparently too old to be Interzone. Again, send me a list and we’ll negotiate a price.
Poking through the storage unit yesterday, I found my stash of Twilight Zone magazines. One of them has In the Sunken Museum, where E.A. Poe visits an undersea city. We used that issue as a prop in our film Mutilation Maniacs.
I also have a collection of Heavy Metal I know I have two of Issue #1, but last time I looked I could only find one of them.
Just a sort of arbitrary choice of what to collect. I just happened to find a lot of 1950’s and 1960’s Analog/Astounding issues (and scattered issues after that point) at some point and decided to buy them. I have nearly the entire run of Interzone also.
I’m glad someone who can appreciate them found them. That’s got to be a super-rare happening.
I’d say most people would react like Lynn’s husband, a smaller percentage would see dollar signs, and a very, very, very small percentage would react like Jonathan.
Lynn unfortunately, you’ll never be able to explain to a non-reader the enormity of his crime. But at the very least, find out what the resale value of those magazines was and point that out to him. Ordinary issues of Playboy from the fifties generally run in the fifty to one hundred dollar range per issue. Issues from 1954 will go for ten times that price. If there actually was a first issue from 1953, it was worth in excess of five thousand dollars. And these are the prices if sold individually; if sold as a complete collection they’d go much higher.
Uhh, maybe I shouldn’t tell you this now, but they still could have been saved. It takes some time and effort, but they were salvagable. Even if mildew has started, you can often bring them back to decent condition.
Museums have developed techniques to save paper items after floods that use rather low-tech methods since many museums can’t afford fancy equipment. It’s perfectly within the reach of most homeowners to be able to duplicate them.
Lynn, I would have killed him on the spot, and immediately regretted it, because it would mean I wouldn’t be able to draw out his suffering further. But then, I never would have married such an uncultured lout in the first place. Ah, what the heck. I’ll kill him even without being married to him.
And Jonathan Chance, I truly envy you. Were I in your place, the first thing I’d do would be to go out and buy a few months worth of provisions. Then, I’d drag the boxes and the provisions into the most comfortable room in the house, and lock the door. The provisions might not even be necessary; I’m not sure I’d stop to eat.