RedFury

This is not by Rafael DeSoto but by William F. Soare. The signature that appears on the cover has been removed and an extra rivet photo-shopped in its place. I think perhaps someone removed the original Soare signature for aesthetic reasons, and then the image was later mis-attributed to DeSoto. Detail from the scan above shows 4 rivets below the smoke and no signature, which has been altered. Detail from my copy shows 3 rivets below the smoke and Soare's clear signature.

At the inaugural World Fantasy Convention in 1975 at Providence, Rhode Island, Manly Wade Wellman won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection for the 1973 Carcosa publication Worse Things Waiting, a collection of his weird fiction stories that included tales from Weird Tales, Strange Stories, and Unknown. Most of you know I'm a huge Weird Tales fan, and Manly Wade Wellman had 40 stories published there, so when I heard that Wellman's WF award might be available I decided to try to get it. After failing to acquire it six months ago, another chance came around and this time I was successful. It arrived today! The award is a sculpture of H.P. Lovecraft and was designed by Gahan Wilson. It's pretty large, probably about 1 foot high and weighs about 10 lbs. I plan to refurbish my home office into more of a library, and this will be the centerpiece.

You may have spotted Arthur J. Burks' name on 6 of the 7 Sky Fighters covers I just posted. While Burks is best remembered today for his weird fiction pulp stories (he had 29 stories in Weird Tales), he was one of the most prolific pulp writers, a "million word a year man" who published over 800 stories, and aviation stories were actually his most common genre.

And here's a few more nice, colorful Sky Fighters covers I picked up recently.

I added a few more Sky Fighters to the pile. This is the first issue from 1932. The series ran a long time, all the way until 1950.

So somehow I had no idea this existed, even though it features one of my favorite pulp covers (<<--- see avatar). It's from 1949, 15 years after the original, and doesn't have the Conan story or any others from the original. But still, I couldn't pass it up and grabbed it (after Dwight frantically called and texted to alert me to it, haha! Thanks Dwight!)

Got some new Oriental Stories and found this tucked inside the 6th issue. Never saw this before! My guess is that people who subscribed right away when the magazine began, who were most likely Weird Tales fans since Oriental Stories was its sister publication, got this subscription renewal notice in the 6th issue, which was 1 year later.

Some Crimson Clown covers

Here's a nice Saunders clown cover I used to have.

1 Startling to a lot of Startlings

Yes indeed!

Aw, man...lol

That's the first issue of Spicy Adventure, the first Spicy overall. So it's not even like they worked their way up to decapitation. They started there.

Another of the new Canadian editions. I love this Boris Dolgov cover that illustrates Mr. George by Stephen Grendon (August Derleth). The story was filmed as an episode of Boris Karloff's Thriller TV show.

The May '45 issue has an even clearer version of the stamp. And you can see the books are pretty nice.