Wednesday, January 31, 2018

From the
archives: Four novels written in '53 and '54, three credited to Edgar Box, the fourth to Cameron Kay, both pseudonyms for Gore Vidal, who needed some fast cash during a time when his early "serious" fiction failed to sell and he had yet to become an in-demand writer for live television drama. Notice that Vidal blurbed his own work on the cover of "Death In the Fifth Position." Cheeky.

 From the archives: Spacemen, June 1964. "The World's Only Space-Movie Magazine." It was rumored that William Shawn wanted to abandon The New Yorker and take over Spacemen, but the opportunity passed when he took three years to edit a 120,000-word-piece by John McPhee on the mating habits of the Tsetse-fly. A shame, for where else could you find Karloff, Bradbury and ads for surplus Air Force parachutes (only $2.95) and Venus Fly Traps ("Admired by Charles Darwin")? How could any 12-year-old resist such a magazine? This one couldn't.