Monday, May 17, 2010Ace Doubles by the numbers

I'm insanely busy right now and will be out of the country for a week or so, so don't expect my usual update next week.  I'm also reading a fascinating book -- Marci McDonald's The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada -- which has some tangential relevance to Julian Comstock (due in paperback any day now); but McDonald's book deserves a more thorough and thoughtful review than I can give it at the moment.  Read it, however, if you have any interest in the subject. 

In the meantime, enjoy some vintage sf cover art.  When I was a pre-pubescent lad my father used to take me to a barbershop in Port Credit, Ontario; in this barbershop there was a long pineboard shelf of old Ace Science Fiction Doubles . . . which, cruelly, I was not allowed to touch.  Since then I've picked up 1950s paperback science fiction almost compulsively whenever I stumble across copies in reasonable condition.  Frustrated book-lust is a harsh and unforgiving mistress.

In the same era the English publisher Penguin Books was producing a line of  thoughtful and interesting paperback fiction, including some science fiction, in editions that were respectable enough to read on the subway but which had all the visual appeal of a personal hygiene pamphlet from the Public Health.  The Ace books, by contrast, were gaudy and probably reprehensible and targeted at at a generation of readers weaned on pulp magazines and EC Comics.  Ace published plenty of good and interesting authors -- there was even a lurid Ace Double edition of William Burroughs' Junkie -- but the cover art was calculated to look like something that would get you kicked out of school for juvenile delinquency.  Below: a sampling of Ace Doubles by the numbers.