Tom Swift and His Hyperdimensional Babe Magnet
Once again, the redoubtable James Lileks has unearthed a treasure trove of off-kilter retroimagery. This time, it's a collection of scanned covers from the Tom Swift Jr. book series. I owned every single one of these hilariously formulaic tomes as a child, but when I became a teenager, I decided that no girl was ever going to want to date a geek who possessed such an adolescent collection of sci-fi wankery, and threw them all away.
It took me a couple more years to realize that not wearing blue pinstriped overalls every day was the second step on my road to obtaining steady female companionship.
UPDATE: Inspired by Uncle Jazzbeau's comment on this post, I went a' googling and found these nice (and ginormous) scans of dustjackets from the original Tom Swift Sr. books that were written in the 1930s.
Comments
If you want to read any of them, they seem to be online here.
Posted by: jim | August 11, 2004 7:42 PM
Ah, those are the original series of Tom Swift Sr. books done by Victor Appleton II back in the 1930s. I presume he was Vic Appleton Junior's father (unless they were both writing under pen names).
Posted by: MrBaliHai | August 11, 2004 11:23 PM
So it dawned on me after I posted, but—what the hay—you found some more cool scanned DJs. Victor Appleton was a house pseudonym, but I saw that most of the older books were written by one guy. A reporter whose name I forget. The only pulps I can remember reading voraciously were the re-issued Doc Savage paperbacks.
Posted by: jim | August 12, 2004 11:37 AM
I collected Doc Savage too; I loved those James Bama covers.
Posted by: MrBaliHai | August 12, 2004 12:28 PM