New This Week: Special Christmas Edition

These are the books I received as Christmas presents yesterday:

MEANWHILE . . .: A BIOGRAPHY OF MILTON CANIFF, Robert C. Harvey -- A massive (nearly 1000 pages) bio of one of the greatest comic strip creators ever and one of my all-time favorites.

MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY, Sean Howe -- Comics have been a big part of my reading life for more than half a century. I've heard many of the stories about the early days of Marvel, but I'm looking forward to finding out plenty of stuff I didn't know.

THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES OF SENORITA SCORPION, VOL. 2, Les Savage Jr. and Emmett McDowell -- I have the first volume of this series reprinting the pulp stories by Les Savage Jr., along with the one entry by Emmett McDowell.

THE BEST OF SPICY MYSTERY, VOL. 1 -- A collection of Weird Menace stories, with Robert Leslie Bellem represented at least three times, twice under his own name and once as Jerome Severs Perry. Some of those other by-lines may be Bellem, too.

I'm looking forward to reading all of these. I also got some Amazon and Half Price Books gift cards, so I'll be picking up some more things in the near future.

The Books of Christmas

These are the books I received as Christmas presents from Livia, Shayna, and Joanna this morning.

Book Sale at the Library

Livia, Joanna, and I went to a big book sale at the local public library this morning.  You never know what you're going to find at sales like that.  The prices were good:  $1 for hardbacks and 50 cents for paperbacks (including trade paperbacks).  I picked up eight or ten novels, most of them fairly contemporary thrillers by authors I haven't read before.  I don't mind betting a buck a book in a case like that, especially when the proceeds benefit the library.  I don't check out all that much these days, but I like knowing it's there.

Those of you who remember my post about baseball novels a month or so ago will understand why I was excited when I found a couple of Chip Hilton novels by Clair Bee.  Unfortunately, when I looked closer I realized they were "new, updated" versions of the original novels.  Maybe I'm being unfair, but right back they went onto the shelf.  Nearly all the "updated" novels I've read in my life have been nowhere near as good as the originals.  (Yes, I'm talking to you, Frank and Joe Hardy and your chums.) Anyway, I did find a 1945 baseball novel by Jackson Scholz.  It's a later reprint but appears to have the original text.  That one I grabbed.

We also got a bunch of non-fiction books on various subjects to go in our research library (a high-falutin' name for dozens of books stacked here, there, and yonder), and Joanna picked up quite a few books for her third-grade class.  Right now the bags, nearly a dozen of them, are still stacked on the sofa, waiting to be gone through, so I don't really know what we have in there.  I do know, though, that it was a very pleasant way to spend part of a Saturday morning when I really should have been working.

Ten Influential Books

Well, you knew I’d have to do this, and you knew it would be a weird list. But here goes, in no order and without overthinking it:

THIS IS IT, MICHAEL SHAYNE by Brett Halliday (Davis Dresser). This made me a fan of the Shayne series, which I continued to read for years. That came in handy later on. Also, it was the first hardboiled private eye novel I ever read, before Hammett, Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Richard S. Prather, and a host of other authors.

HOPALONG CASSIDY by Clarence E. Mulford. The first real Western novel I ever read.

HAVE SPACESUIT WILL TRAVEL by Robert A. Heinlein. The first real science-fiction novel I ever read.

FANTASTIC FOUR #16 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. I’ve told the story before about how a couple of my cousins gave me a stack of comics they didn’t want on Christmas Day, 1963. I loved them all, but this was my favorite, the issue that turned me from a comics reader into a full-fledged comics fan.

BABYSITTER’S GUIDE BY DENNIS THE MENACE by Hank Ketcham. The first paperback book I ever bought, in the pharmacy of the old Medical Arts Building in Fort Worth, sometime in 1961.

BIGGER THAN TEXAS by William R. Cox. The first adult paperback I ever bought, in a drugstore in Goldsmith, Texas, in the summer of 1963. (There’ll be a Forgotten Books post coming up about this one in the relatively near future.)

THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway. One of the few books I’ve read multiple times.

THE ROCKET’S SHADOW by John Blaine (Hal Goodwin). The first Rick Brant novel. I’ve posted about it before.

CONAN THE USURPER by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp. The Lancer edition that I bought brand-new in Barber’s Bookstore in downtown Fort Worth. When I read de Camp’s introduction and realized that a real author came from the same part of the country where I lived, it helped convince me that I could write books, too.

LONGARM by Tabor Evans (Lou Cameron). To bring this full circle, like THIS IS IT, MICHAEL SHAYNE, LONGARM turned me into a fan of a series that has been very important to me. As in, more than two and a half million words important.

I could come up with others, but some of these would remain constant no matter how much the rest of the list changed.

Five Favorite Internet Stores

Evan (Dave) Lewis tagged me with this meme, which involves naming five favorite Internet stores other than Amazon. I don't do much shopping on the Internet other than for old books, so my top spot definitely has to go to ABE. But I also buy pulp reprints from various publishers who sell through Lulu, and VCI Entertainment has some great obscure DVDs, and we buy more current stuff through Half.com and Deep Discount. That's five, isn't it?

Attention Book Collectors

You need to read this.

To expand a little on what Scott says, when I lost my collection to the fire, I had some rules about replacing it, too. I wasn't going to buy any book that I'd already read. Well, that didn't last long, but I've managed to keep it under control fairly well. I haven't really bought anything that I'd already read just to have a copy of it. Anything I've bought that I've already read, I intend to read again. Also, new books or replacement copies of books I had before but had never read had to be something that I actually intended to read soon, not just "Oh, that looks interesting, I might get around to reading that someday". I was really bad about that before.

Well, you know where this is going. When I buy a book, I still intend to read it soon, but soon has expanded to mean sometime in the next year or so. I'm sure the definition will continue to grow. I already find myself in the bookstore looking at a book and thinking, "Do I have this one?", and I don't know the answer. I don't think it's happened already, but it's possible that I've bought the same book more than once. (Long-time readers of this blog may recall that I used to have five or six copies of THE BAMBOO BOMB by James Dark. I don't see that one around anymore. But I've already read it, so by rule I couldn't buy it again if I came across a copy. Well, maybe for old time's sake.)

What it boils down to, of course, is that people like me -- and probably many of you -- can find a way to rationalize buying almost any book. And all I can say is, thank God for tolerant spouses.