Here’s a little something to decorate your pulp bookshelf.
It’s a 3-3/4-inch Kanamit action figure from the Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man.” Bif Bang Pow! has introduced a new line based on the classic TV series.
The pulp angle? Damon Knight‘s story “To Serve Man” first appeared in the November 1950 number of Galaxy Science Fiction, a digest fiction magazine that first appeared on newsstands the month before with its October 1950 issue.
While the Twilight Zone Kanamit doesn’t quite resemble the Kanamits described by Knight (think “pig-like”), 7-foot actor Richard Keil offered an imposing interpretation.
A nice thing about the $10 action figure: It’s reproduced in vintage TV black-and-white.
LIBRARY BOOKS: The Library of Congress has posted dozens of vintage books for reading online, including a pair that were originally published in the pulps.
These aren’t just your typical ebooks; you know, physical books scanned and reformatted as epubs or text. No, the LOC has posted scans of each page of the books, so you can enjoy the typography and illustrations in the original printings.
Click over to the LOC’s Classic Books at Read.gov and check out more than 60 books, including “Aesop’s Fables,” “Dracula,” In the Court of King Arthur” and “A Study in Scarlet,” featuring Sherlock Holmes.
Look in the “Kids” section to find our pulp tie-ins. “Jungle Tales of Tarzan,” the 1919 Grosset & Dunlap edition (with J. Allen St. John‘s illustrations), collects 12 short stories of Tarzan written by Edgar Rice Burroughs and published in Blue Book between September 1916 and August 1917. And, “A Princess of Mars,” the 1917 Grosset & Dunlap edition (with Frank E. Schoonover‘s illustrations), introduces Burroughs’ Barsoom series and was first serialized as “Under the Moons of Mars” in All-Story in 1912.
A PULP PASSING: I also want to take a moment to note the death of Peter Ruber on March 6, 2014. He was 73.
Ruber served as editor of Arkham House in the late 1990s. He also co-wrote “The King of the Pulps,” a biography of pulp fictioneer H. Bedford-Jones with Darrell C. Richardson and Victor A. Berch.
George Vanderburgh, proprietor of The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box press, wrote a nice remembrance on his blog, The Batteredbox’s Weblog.
