A Sense of Doubt blog post #3089 - Recreation of 1970s Science Fiction Bookstore Shelves and Books

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3089 - Recreation of 1970s Science Fiction Bookstore Shelves and Books

I love looking at books.

And so, I "grokked" what Michael Chabon was doing here. Like him, I spent hours in those book stores or news agencies pouring over these books, though more often than not just staring at the covers.

So, this project spoke to me.

Thanks for tuning in.




https://www.openculture.com/2023/08/novelist-michael-chabon-digitally-re-creates-the-science-fiction-fantasy-section.html

Novelist Michael Chabon Digitally Re-Creates the Science Fiction & Fantasy Section of His Favorite 1970s Bookstore

in Books, History, Sci Fi | August 4th, 2023

Michael Chabon was born in 1963, which placed him well to be influenced by the unpredictable, indiscriminate, and often lurid cultural cross-currents of the nineteen-seventies. He seemed to have received much of that influence at Page One, the local bookstore in his hometown of Columbia, Maryland — and it was to Page One that his imagination drifted during the long days of the COVID-19 pandemic spent in his personal library. “As I sat around communing with my tattered old friends,” he writes, “I discovered that I retained a sharp recollection — title, author, cover design — of what felt like every single book that had ever appeared on those tall shelves along the left wall of Page One, toward the back, between 1972 and 1980.”

That was the store’s “Science Fiction & Fantasy” section, which in that period was well-stocked with titles by such stars of those genres as Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. LeGuin, Arthur C. Clarke, J. G. Ballard, C. J. Cherryh, Michael Moorcock, and Philip K. Dick.

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Or at least it did if Chabon’s digital re-creation “The Shelves of Time” is anything to go by. Downloadable here in “small” (96 MB), “large” (283 MB) and “very large” (950 MB) formats, the lavish image functions as what Chabon calls a “time telescope,” offering “a look back at the visuals that embodied and accompanied my early aspirations as a writer, and at the mass-market splendor of paperback sf and fantasy in those days.”

“I’m the same age as Chabon, and I was also a bookstore rat, staring at these exact same covers and agonizing over which one I’d lay down my $1.25 for,” writes Ruben Bolling at Boing Boing. “Just look at those beautiful John Carter of Mars covers. I collected and cherished these, and the Tarzan series.” Bolling also highlights the adaptations Chabon includes on these re-imagined shelves: there’s “the James Blish Star Trek series, just as I remember it,” and also the novelization of Star Wars, which he read before the opening of the film itself.  “So instead of experiencing the movie as it should have been — as campy movie fun — I experienced it as an adaptation of a literary work.”

Despite being a couple of decades younger, I, too, remember these covers vividly. My own sci-fi-and-fantasy period occurred in the late nineties, by which time these very same mass-market paperbacks from the seventies were turning up in quantity at used bookstores. For me, few images from these genres of that era could trigger reading memories as rich as those Ballantine covers of The Sheep Look Up, The Shockwave Rider, and Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, a British specialist in social and environmental catastrophe. Like many readers, I put this sort of thing aside after a few years, but Chabon has proven infinitely more dedicated: half a century after his days haunting Page One, his mission to “drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it,” as critic Ruth Franklin once described it, continues apace.

via Boing Boing

Related content:

The Art of Sci-Fi Book Covers: From the Fantastical 1920s to the Psychedelic 1960s & Beyond

Novelist Michael Chabon Sang in a Punk Band During the ’80s: Newly Released Audio Gives Proof

600+ Covers of Philip K. Dick Novels from Around the World: Greece, Japan, Poland & Beyond

The Dune Encyclopedia: The Controversial, Definitive Guide to the World of Frank Herbert’s Sci-Fi Masterpiece (1984)

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: Animation Concepts

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Similar to the article above, here's some of my shelves from the old St. Antoine house in Kalamazoo before we moved out west.

I just love looking at books.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2308.03 - 10:10

- Days ago = 2953 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.