Heritage Auction Galleries yesterday alerting me to its upcoming auction on January 18 of a Triceratops horridus skull, and I’ve been lusting after the thing ever since.

The skull, found on a private ranch in Montana, is 7½ feet from beak to frill, with the frill stretching out more than 5 feet wide. Amazingly, this fossil is 93% complete!

And how cool is this? Supposedly—

Though the left brow horn was missing it is believed that it was sheared off in battle as the bone indicates it was broken off while the animal was still alive evidenced by signs of healing.

I want it! (more…)

As you can see from this advertisement, now that I’ve tired of taking care of your corpse during my stint as a funeral director, I’ve decided to take care of your health instead.

As this ad from The Cosmopolitan urges, “In the list of good resolutions for ’93″—and that’s 1893—”why not include health betterment?”

I know that you’ve all resolved to have healthier new years, so start using Scott’s Emulsion today!

After all, “its effect in Consumption, Scrofula, and other diseases causing rapid loss of healthy tissue has given Scott’s Emulsion of Cod-Liver Oil with Hypophosphites of Lime and Soda, marked pre-eminence over all other forms of nourishment employed in medical practice.”

Why, it’s “almost as palatable as milk.”

“In many thousands of homes the old year will be tuned out and the new one tuned in over the radio,” according to this ad from the January 1927 issue of Scribner’s.

“They can share in the dance music, the cathedral chimes, and the festivities from far and near; listen to the voices of gifted singers and entertainers and to messages of good cheer and inspiration.”

Perhaps it’s time for you to jump on board this new technology since it’s about to turn 1928 and “the experimental days of radio are now largely over.”

Happy New Year!

So in this morning’s dream, I’m in the back seat of a car with an unidentified group of friends as we drive through small-town America. (They’re unidentified not because they’re necessarily strangers, but because their identities are unimportant to the dream at this point, I guess, so I’m as yet unaware of who they are and whether or not I know them in real life.) As we pass one home, sort of a refurbished farmhouse, I note that next to it is an exact replica of the massive perisphere from the 1939 World’s Fair.

It’s so odd to me to come across this unexpectedly in the middle of nowhere that I want us to stop and take a look, to learn how and why the thing is there, but the faceless driver keeps speeding on, turning this way and that through the small-town streets no matter how much I protest. But I so want to investigate the perisphere that I open the car door and tumble out as it continues speeding on without me.

After I stop rolling and bouncing, I start walking back, but long before I find any perisphere, I discover the town’s small museum. Inside, I chat with the caretaker, an older woman, and for some reason she tells me that I might have heard of the town because the name of their sheriff is Wesley Snipes. In the dream, that strikes a chord, and I remember having heard about that aspect of the town in a mocking television news report. (In real life, of course, I know of no such coincidental occurrence.)

As I wander the small building, it turns out to be more gift shop than museum. Mixed in with perisphere-themed objects such as crystal paperweights, drawings, and paper sculptures, are things that have nothing to do with the perisphere, such as ornate editions of Lord of the Rings. As I move through the aisles, puzzling over why these random items should be for sale, one of my companions is suddenly beside me, having convinced my fellow travelers to double back and rescue me.

It’s Julie Watt-Evans, with whom I once took a Chinese language course in real life. Her husband, Lawrence Watt-Evans, is not with her, and I have no idea if he had even been with us in the car in the first place.

I wake up as Julie and I eye the same crystal paperweight and try to decide which of us should end up with it, since we both seem to want it. I never become aware of the identities of the rest of my friends, and I never do make it back to the perisphere.

As Irene was preparing an ancient address book for recycling, she pulled out the pages and ripped the book in half, at which time she discovered that the padded covers had been lined with rectangles of newspaper to give them some heft. There were about a dozen or so slips bound within each side. While we have no idea of the dates of the newspapers from which these were sliced, we think that the address book itself had to have been about forty years old.

Three of the pages contained commercial artwork. Neither one of us can read the text, so we have no idea what’s being illustrated, but still, this was an intriguing, serendipitous discovery.

It makes me wonder what else lies hidden away within book covers, perhaps never to be found!

How would you like to buy a copy of Spider-Man #51 for only 20 cents? Or get a 12-issue subscription to The Fantastic Four for only $1.75? No problem! Just make sure that you have your time machine set to take you back to 1968.

Here are two mimeographed fliers sent out by Marvel Comics and received by me forty years ago, one selling back issues and the other hawking subscriptions. The ink is fairly faded, but if you click on the image several times, you’ll be able to view readable copies.

I got these in the mail on April 26, 1968, presumably because I was a member of the Merry Marvel Marching Society. I know the exact date because I scribbled that information on the back of one of the sheets in the clumsy handwriting of a 13-year-old. I guess that seemed important at the time.

Note that on the subscription flier, someone—maybe even Fabulous Flo Steinberg, perhaps?—had manually crossed out the offer for Ghost Rider subs, since the final issue of that character’s run had been cover-dated November 1967. (That would have been for the western hero, as opposed to the not-yet-invented motorcycle-riding one.)

I remember how, in response to this solicitation, I taped nickels, dimes, and quarters to index cards, mailed the whole sticky mess to 625 Madison Avenue, and waited anxiously for the issues I’d somehow missed. I wish I could do that again!

Don’t you?

So there I was, taking a break from putting the final polish on a new short story, and I sat down with Jeffrey Ford’s The Drowned Life. Even though I was already familiar with many of these stories, having experienced a number of them during their original publications thanks to many perspicacious editors, and had even heard him read some of them aloud, including the collection’s title story at last year’s Readercon, as I read them straight through it was like a receiving a blow with a 2 × 4 to the back of the skull.

The highlights for me were “The Night Whiskey,” in which a cloistered town’s strange fruit causes visions in some, while at the same time creating a need for others to pluck the wandering dreamers from the tree tops, and “Present From the Past,” in which the removal of a dead oak from the backyard brings a family together and reveals a forgotten treasure, and “The Bedroom Light,” in which what remains unsaid is far more important than what is said, and …

In fact, why am I bothering to pluck out individual titles and call them highlights? They’re all highlights. In fact, The Drowned Life is the best book I’ve read all year. (more…)

The focus of this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine is its annual “The Lives They Lived” feature, which memorializes many of those we’ve lost this year, including George Carlin, Will Elder, Joan Winston, and others.

My favorite component of the issue turned out not to be the words, but rather a single photograph, taken in 1939 of pals Al Jaffee and Will Elder as they yukked it up in their high school cafeteria:

It’s easy to see why they were destined to become part of the “usual gang of idiots” behind Mad magazine. I’d have killed to have lunch with those two guys. They’d have had me snorting milk out my nose in seconds! (more…)

An inordinate amount of attention is suddenly being paid to the Scarecrow stories I wrote for Marvel back in the ’70s, especially considering the lack of attention that was paid to them at the time. The recent reprintings of the tales in the Legion of Monsters hardcover and the Essential Marvel Horror volume two trade paperback has caused a flurry of blogging about those ancient stories lately, such as the comment from Greg Hatcher over at Comic Book Resources this week that “there are moments of real potential in Scott Edelman’s work on the Scarecrow.”

Whether there was or not, that potential remained unfulfilled, as I only ever got to script two issues about the character. But since people are talking about the Scarecrow again, it seems a good time to share some never-before-reprinted art which appeared in Marvel’s UK titles when the stories were reprinted there.

First up, three covers of the weekly black-and-white book The Super-Heroes from the mid-’70s:

(more…)

I’m about halfway through the first volume of Essential Solitude: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, and that is where I think I’m going to have to stop. It isn’t that Lovecraft doesn’t have fascinating things to say. It’s more that at times the things he has to say are … well … too fascinating.

Sometimes I find his sentiments interesting in terms of the way they differ from my own, as in this letter from August 12, 1928, in which he states:

I prefer non-committal, non-sensational titles as a general rule; especially when the stories are themselves subtle & elusive in their weirdness.

Not me! I prefer more ornate titles, both in my own writing (the titles of mine I like the best are always more complex, as with “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” and “10 Things I’ve Learned About Writing”) and in that of others (as with Samuel R. Delany’s “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” and Harlan Ellison’s “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World”).

I also break with Lovecraft’s comments from August 20, 1928:

I note that you prefer the dialogue form as a medium of expression—a circumstance which perhaps indicates that you are a playwright at heart. I myself am the exact opposite. My purpose in writing a tale is to delineate a certain visual picture or crystallise a certain atmospheric effect—in which human beings are only incidental “properties”.

While it’s interesting to see Lovecraft make his methods concrete in that way—since the allure of his stories has always been the language and the atmosphere, rather than any of the people—in my own work, it is the people and characters who come first. (more…)