u/Supro1560S

Vaughn Bodē’s cover is so unlike anything I’d ever expect in an Ace double, but R.A. Lafferty is pretty much unlike anything you’d expect in an Ace double, either. This was Bodē’s only Ace cover; most people probably know him from Cheech Wizard. I bought this for Lafferty, but Pity About Earth sounds good too.

A few weeks ago I posted about the retail display rack that someone was giving away free, which I modified and repurposed into a paperback book spinner rack. It has worked out very well in that capacity. I don’t know what it was originally used for; Google’s AI thinks it was for paper napkins, and that’s reasonable, as my best guess was small boxes of Kleenex. (EDIT: Solved. It was a display rack for cocktail napkins.) As you can see in the last photo showing the “before” state, it had too many tiers of pockets, with not enough space to allow books, but some quick snip-snips with bolt cutters and filing down of any sharp edges rectified that problem. The “short” pockets I left on the bottom work great for Big Little Books, of which I have a modest collection. I got the idea of decorating the empty spaces where the extra pockets used to be with old pulp magazine trading cards to break up the space and add visual interest, so I did that today. I added the “BOOKS” topper sign a couple of weeks ago. Now to just get a weekend where I don’t have a million other things I have to do, and sit down and actually organize this thing.

Fifty cents at a library sale today. There’s hardly any Poe story or poem I don’t already have in a big, hardcover collection, but I couldn’t resist this handy, attractive paperback. Lovely cover design by Robert F. Hallock.

Bought for $1 at a library sale, and I don’t even like having this thing in my house. The back cover proudly proclaims, “Cover design by Steven Amsterdam” and “Cover image by Richard Ross”, but they ought to be goddamn arrested for this shit.

Elvira?

I’ve been looking for a decent paperback spinner rack that didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Yesterday there was an ad on Marketplace for a FREE “display rack”, and it looked like it might work. I drove 25 minutes away to pick it up, took a pocket paperback with me, tested the top pocket, and it was a suitable size for mass market paperbacks. I loaded it in the car, took it home, then realized that in my haste, I never tested the pockets from the second row down, which turned to NOT be tall enough to allow standard paperbacks. I was crestfallen. Then I got the bright idea of just cutting off the second, fourth, and sixth row of pockets to make room, so I got bolt cutters, cut them off, and filed off any sharp edges. I left the bottom row of pockets on, because even though they can’t accept regular paperbacks, Big Little Books fit in there perfectly, spine up, and I have a small collection of those. I was pretty disheartened at first, but this turned out pretty good. It spins easily and the pockets are deep enough to hold a lot of small paperbacks.

I’ve been looking for a decent paperback spinner rack that didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Yesterday there was an ad on Marketplace for a FREE “display rack”, and it looked like it might work. I drove 25 minutes away to pick it up, took a pocket paperback with me, tested the top pocket, and it was a suitable size for mass market paperbacks. Loaded it in the car, took it home, then realized I never tested the lower pockets, which weren’t tall enough to allow a standard paperback. I got the bright idea of just cutting off the second, fourth, and sixth level of pockets to make room, so I got bolt cutters, cut them off, and filed off any sharp edges. I left the bottom row of pockets on, because even though they can’t accept regular paperbacks, Big Little Books fit in there perfectly, spine up, and I have a small collection of those. I was pretty disheartened at first, but this turned out pretty good. It spins pretty good, and the pockets are deep, so they can hold a lot of small paperbacks.

White is best known for his Sector General stories, which are a lot of fun.

White is best known for his Sector General stories, which are a lot of fun. He was great at presenting truly “alien” aliens.

A case of how to do it and how not to do it.

I just picked both of these up recently, and already read Little Fuzzy. Just like the cover states, it really is delightful, and Victor Kalin’s cover matches the tone of the book perfectly. I started reading The Other Human Race (which would later be republished and retitled as Fuzzy Sapiens - a much better title), and I’m enjoying it as well. I have to think that The Other Human Race didn’t perform as well as it could have because the cover art is terrible, and the title, artwork, and description on the front make it very unclear that it’s a sequel to Little Fuzzy. I also have to wonder if that contributed to Piper’s suicide a few months after its publication.