The first three of the Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars/Barsoom series of novels, released by Ballantine Books/Del Rey in 1973, with covers by Gino D’Achille.
I was already familiar with Burroughs from his Tarzan novels, so I was excited to read more of his work. However, there was something about the realistic work of those cover paintings that drew me in.
These were my first experience with John Carter and the world of Barsoom. I remember seeing the books in the extremely tiny “science fiction/fantasy” section (literally less than one shelf!) of the bookstore nearest to me when I was growing up in the wilds of eastern Long Island. This bookstore was soooooo snooty that they would not carry paperback books until shortly before these were released.
The books had a $1.25 or $1.50 price tag then, but consider that paperbacks are going for nearly $10 now and you’ll understand how expensive they were for a kid. I was already dealing with sticker shock from comic books going from 20 cents to 25 cents that year (a 25% price increase!). Still, I could buy 5 or 6 comics for the price of one of these books, so they represented one heck of an investment for me.
Luckily, I was flush with cash (a whole $5) from mowing my grandparents’ lawn and weeding their garden, so I splurged on these three books. I’m glad I did because I didn’t know at the time that they were a trilogy. I was pretty sure that once the bookstore sold out the staff wouldn’t order any more. And I was right.
For the longest time these were the only Barsoom books I was able to find (libraries around me, or at least the ones I could reach by bike, didn’t carry any novels by Burroughs), so I ended up reading these over and over again. So much so that the covers fell off and the books fell apart.
At the time I was never able to find all the books in this release in any stores. Oh, I could find the odd #8 (Swords of Mars), or #10 (Llana of Gathol), but I wanted to read them all in order!
It wasn’t until years later, when the complete series was re-released with those wonderful Michael Whelan covers, that I was able to get a complete set.
im not joking when i say that this meme single handedly got me invested in learning how the fuck electrical production works small scale so that i could explain it to somebody from a millennium ago
If that’s a thing that bothers you for more subjects then just electricity there’s actually a book for this! That I own! That is both very stupid and fairly useful! And entertaining!
How to invent everything: a survival guide for the stranded time traveler is the book for you, complete with flowchart about how to identify what time you’ve landed yourself in! It’s very funny and very fun and informative and starts with the production of written language and works it’s way forward through inventions of varying complexity, all framed in the way of “so you got into this time machine from our company and it’s broken, huh? Well tough fucking shit! Welcome to your new home!”
I used to own this shirt:
Here’s a more readable version of the print (in poster form):
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
