My son and I went to Scarborough Renaissance Faire a couple of weeks ago. It’s in Waxahatchie, which is south of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. (Lou Antonelli assures me that “Waxahatchie” means “where the buffalo poop”.) Since we came in from the west, I stopped at a couple of Half Price Books, one in Burleson and one in Fort Worth.
This past weekend my son was competing at the State Solo and Ensemble contest in Austin. Austin has five Half Price Books. I managed to hit four of them, two on the way in and two when I left. (I didn’t ride on the bus this year and went to visit family when I left, so I went out a different way than I came in.)
I bought more than you see here, a lot more. (Don’t tell my wife.) There were plenty of DAW paperbacks with the yellow covers to be had. Unfortunately none were the Lin Carter The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories or the Karl Edward Wagner The Year’s Best Horror Stories. That was probably a bit too much to hope for. I’ve got all of Carter’s volumes, but I’m missing some of Wagner’s. Although speaking of Wagner…
Looky what I found.
Paperbacks weren’t the only things I looked at. While I was primarily looking for pulpy paperbacks, especially DAW titles, I did peruse the hardcovers and trade paperbacks at all the stores. There were a few nice finds there, as well, the best of which you can see in the photo on the right. The title on the lower right is an anthology containing stories by Wagner, Joseph Payne Brennan, and David Morrell. I have a mass market paperback of this one, but they don’t show up often, so I grabbed the trade paper edition. The silver book at the upper right is Masques II. The book in the middle on the left is The Soft Whisper of the Dead by Charles L. Grant. Next to it is The Definitive Best of the Horror Show.
I’m not going to be buying many books for the next few months, at least not once Howard Days is over. My son is going to a trumpet camp where he’ll be staying in a hotel in Dallas later in the summer. I’ll be staying with him and driving him to camp. During the day, I’ll be at the hotel working on revising lab manuals. Dallas and the surrounding suburbs have plenty of good used book stores. I promise to be good.
Now to figure out where I’m going to put all of these…
Wow. Those are some great horror titles!
I don’t think I shared on Twitter but I acquired 4/5 of Les Daniels Don Sebastian (the vampire) novels. I’d read the novella of “Yellow Fog” last year in the MAMMOTH BOOK OF VAMPIRES and it was excellent.
Yeah, they are. I couldn’t let them get away. I’m not familiar with Les Daniels. I’ll have to look him up.
He lived in Providence and was a NECONer but passed before I started attending.
He wrote lots of non-fiction about comics.
I believe the Don Sebastian novels were his only published fiction.
Thanks. I’ll look for them.
Oh man. I’ve seen Mention My Name In Atlantis at one of my bookstores (with a different cover, interestingly). I haven’t been back in a while, but last time I was there it still hadn’t moved, after months…
I saw the other cover at one of the HPBs I visited but didn’t get it since I already had this one.
Always good to pick up some pulpy, yellow-spined DAWs! Crom, Don’s daughter really let the side down when she took over.
BTW, you don’t have this tagged under “DAW”.
Fixed. Thanks. That’s what I get for writing late at night.
True. Don loved him some pulp. Betsy, not so much. I hardly pick up DAW books anymore. I don’t have enough years left to invest in those types of doorstoppers.
This is a good haul. Being bad is good.
I only showed a small part of it. There are several dozen paperbacks I didn’t show.
But yes, being bad can be good.