Gallery of Space Books
I've owned and read quite a few of these books too over the years.
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August 11, 2004
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.