[I sent Walker a mail after the recent Heritage Auctions. For those who didn't follow it, the first issue of the Shadow went for $156,000. From there the conversation went, as it usually does when we chat, to Adventure and what issues were the hardest to find when he was collecting. He sent me a long reply that really made sense as a blog. Enjoy!]
Your question about what years of Adventure
did I have the most trouble collecting made me think all the way back to 1972,
almost 50 years ago. When I attended the first Pulpcon in 1972, my main
collecting interest was Black Mask and Weird Tales, both of which
I was just about finishing up complete sets. I had started collecting them back
in 1968 after being discharged from the army. My main goal back then was
not to find a job and start a career, not to get married and raise a family,
not to buy a car. Not any normal goal most men in their twenties would
have after the two year disruption in their lives caused by the draft.
No, my main goal was to compile
complete sets of Black Mask and Weird Tales along with other
detective magazines like Dime Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly.
Also I was on my way to completing sets of all the weird menace pulps like Horror
Stories, Terror Tales, Dime Mystery, Thrilling Mystery, and
all the Red Circle titles. True, somehow, along the way, I picked up a wife, a
family, a job, and a car. I also got a house but I saw it as a place to
store my pulps and hang my original pulp cover paintings.
I had been collecting SF magazines
since 1956 when I discovered and bought my first magazine off the
newsstand. It was as if blinders had been lifted off my eyes and at the
age of 13 I saw what I thought was the most beautiful thing, the February 1956
issue of Galaxy SF. I quickly started collecting the other SF titles and
eventually ended up with almost all the back issues of the old
magazines.
Fast forward 10 years to 1966 and
I'm in the army, away from my collection of SF. But then a life changing
event happened. Sometimes you hear about books changing your life.
Well it's true. I bought the paperback collection edited by Ron Goulart called THE
HARDBOILED DICKS at the army post exchange. I had stupidly thought
that the other adult pulps like the detective titles had not survived. I
figured the SF pulps survived because teenage boys and young men had saved them
but that grown men had read and thrown away the other genre titles. Goulart's
book proved me wrong. I wrote Ron and he sold me all his copies of the
detective pulps for $2 or $3 each. I was off and running on a lifetime
pulp quest of reading and collecting these great old magazines.
By the time the first Pulpcon was
held in 1972, I really knew nothing about Adventure magazine but the
convention had stacks of the magazine for sale for around a dollar each.
Nils Harden had all ten years of the forties, each year tied up with
string. He wanted $100 but was reserving them for a customer named Harry
Noble. I asked Harry if I could have the set and he said yes because he
had been buying pulps for a quarter or 50 cents and didn't want to pay a dollar
each.
 |
| Nils Hardin editing an issue of Xenophile |
After the convention, I drove to
Harry's place in Morristown, NJ to buy more back issues of Adventure. He
lived in a converted army barracks on the grounds of Greystone hospital.
For $30 a month the hospital let employees live in these shacks. Harry had a
two bedroom tiny apartment full of books and pulps. He also had 4
children and a wife. Decades later, at his funeral, I asked one of his
daughters how Harry managed to fit everyone in such a small space. The
two girls had one bedroom, the two boys had the other, and Harry and his wife slept
on the sofa bed in the living room. I remember seeing the bed which was covered
in pulp shreds. Even the kitchen table was covered in pulp flakes.
When Harry put some chocolate chip cookies on the table you ended up eating
cookie crumbs and pulp shreds, a healthy diet that no doubt contributed to his
long life.
 |
| A drone shot of Greystone Hospital. A suitable residence for a Weird Tales collector. |
He had a complete set of Adventure,
all 753 pulp issues, 1910-1953. He also had a couple hundred duplicates
which he agreed to sell me at $2 each. Most were in the 1920's and
1930's. I still remember Harry slapping down each issue on the table,
raising clouds of crumbs and pulp chips, as he chanted $2, $4, $6, etc. I
was in heaven. Right then Adventure became my favorite magazine
and I could hardly drive home in my hurry to read them and find more back
issues.
So to answer your question, what
years did I have the most trouble collecting? Hell, none of them.
Back then they did not seem rare at all. I quickly completed my Adventure
set in a couple years, even the harder to find issues in the teens. In
fact, several years later, Harry sold me a complete duplicate set of all the
753 issues and I kept the better condition copies and sold the others through
the mail and at Pulpcon.
 |
| Ad in Xenophile for Adventure |
Though the teen issues(1910-1919) were harder to find, in
the 1970's they were still inexpensive. I don't remember paying more
than $2 to $5 each. The only exception being the first issue which I
managed to find for $10. The first few issues in 1910-1911 were
published with sturdy book paper which is still white more than a
hundred years later.
 |
| Adventure issue #1, November 1910 |
In the 1970's and even the 1980's
there were not a lot of people collecting Adventure. I had very little
competition while collecting the magazine. In fact most collectors were
interested in the SF pulps and the hero pulps like Doc Savage, The Shadow,
The Spider, etc. At first I also collected the hero pulps and soon had
almost all of them. There were some exceptions. I never bothered with Doc
Savage because the issues were reprinted in paperback. I stopped at
150 issues for The Shadow because I tried a dozen times to read the pulp
but Walter Gibson's style was just too turgid and long winded. I found all the
hero pulps, except maybe The Spider and Secret Agent X, to be not
as interesting as the adult pulps like Black Mask, Blue Book, Short Stories,
etc. I soon got rid of them and had to laugh when Harry Noble called them
"unreadable crap". My feeling now is that they were aimed at
the teenage boy market.
My favorite years are 1918-1927 when Arthur Sullivant
Hoffman was editor. I've read most of the stories and made notes of my
comments, grade, and date read. All the issues have pieces of paper
with my comments in them. Now of course the early issues are the hardest
to get but it is still possible to put together a complete set of Adventure.
It just takes longer and costs more money. For instance Ed Hulse, in a few
years, has managed to find almost all the issues. Just recently, a few
years ago, I was reading a listing of pulp related books for sale from Mike
Chomko. At the very end of a long listing he casually mentioned that he
was thinking of selling his Adventures, over 200 issues, all in the
1920's. I quickly wrote Mike and offered to buy all he had even though I
had the issues already. I was interested in buying them in order to
upgrade my copies. For the next few years I kept asking Mike about them
and finally one year he brought the issues to Pulpfest for me to look at.
I spent a few hours looking at them and we completed the sale. I now had over
200 duplicates and Sai was first in line to buy all of them.
(Sai: I was going to buy those but Walker got in ahead of me. Never gives up collecting, and never sells anything, much to my regret.)
I've had a lot of fun reading and
collecting Adventure these past 50 years and I miss talking about the
magazine with Harry Noble. I wish I could do it all over again. I'm
getting older now and it's hard to imagine an afterlife without Adventure
magazine. Harry told me if there was an afterlife for book and pulp
collectors, he would find a way to let me know. He died at the age of 88 in
2006 but so far there has been nothing but silence.
(Sai: I hope the ghosts of the books we love stay with us in the afterlife.)
