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Fantasy Commentator, v. 1, issue 7, Summer 1945

Page 134

134          FANTASY COMMENTATOR

This-'n'-That
    This issue's expected crop of editorial miscellany continues the listing of 1944 books of fantasy fiction published in the United States from where it was abruptly terminated in the last issue...  Beth Brown's Universal Station (Regent House, $2 3/4) is a somewhat sentimentalized treatment of the life-after-death theme, and is quite entertainingly written. The World Healer by Paul M. Kourenoff ($2 1/2 from the author) tells of "the future of medicine in 199-" in fictional guise. If old Irish legends appeal to you, try the modern versions of several as presented in John Bayley's Forty Heads (Day, $3). No less than three volumes in the genre have appeared under the authorship of Eric Linklater, all published by the Macmillan Company: The Wind on the Moon ($2 3/4), a rather dilute Alice-in-Wonderland tale; Crisis in Heaven ($1 1/2), a play of Elysium, with resurrected historical characters: The Great Ship and Rabalais Replies ($1 1/4), the latter play in which is on the very similar lines. The second of Vardis Fisher's fine series of novels about prehistoric man is The Golden Rooms (Vanguard, $2 1/2), which is must reading for those who like the theme treated. Worlds Beginning by Robert Ardrey (Duell Sloane & Pierce, $2 1/2) is a tale of the future. And in the biographical field, two authors of imaginative fiction gain mention: Arthur E. Morgan's Edward Bellamy (Columbia, $5) and Joseph D. Bennett's Baudelaire (Princeton, $2); the latter volume is the first in English to deal at any length with Baudelaire's poetry.
    The most interesting items on the agenda of the pocketbook publishers are Penguin's two (still in print), Tales of Piracy, Crime and Ghosts by Daniel Defoe, and William Sloane's To Walk the Night; and if you missed the recent omnibus volume of Steven Vincent Benet's work, Penguin has a sampling of it ready for you in O'Halloran's Luck and other Short Stories. Bart House has followed its first collection of Lovecraft tales with a second, The Dunwich Horror, which contains two other works of this great author in addition. A few months ago The Face in the Abyss joined the five previous Merritt novels under the Avon House banner; The Ship of Ishtar is expected to follow this in August, with The Metal Monster scheduled for Spring of 1946... All these sell for 25 cents.
    So far this year but four new titles of fantasy have come to your editor's attention: an American reprint of the British Fireman Flower and Other Stories (Vanguard, $2 1/2); the misnamed Collected Stories of Ben Hecht (Crown, $3) ---this being but a brief selection of Hecht's shorter tales---which contains two of the fantasies from the author's earlier Book of Miracles; Robert Frost's allegorical play A Masque of Reason (Holt, $2); and from Britian a supernatural novel by Oliver Onions titled The Story of Ragged Robyn (Joseph, 8/6).
    Of interest to those of Commentator's readers having interest in interplanetary travel are three books on rocketry that have recently appeared: Eugen Sanger;s Raketen-Flugtechnik (Edwards, $5), Hermann Oberth's Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (3. aufl. of Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen) (Edwards, $8) and The Coming Age of Rocket Power (Harper, $3 1/2) by G. Edward Pendray. The former two are reprints of the original German editions,  and Mr. Pendray is probably better known to most fantasy fans as "Gawain Edwards," under which pseudonym he wrote some science-fiction a few years back...
    Acknowledgements are hereby made to C. J. Fern, Jr., who contributed several of the titles of new books mentioned in last Fantasy Commentator's editorial, and to The Burning Glass, from whose pages Joyce Mayday's brief book reviews in this number were taken...
    "By-Products," also in this number, appears at a sadly appropriate moment: I am grieved to say that it is probably the last of the author's articles to be published, for on April 16th last its author passed away. His death came as a not-unexpected blow to those who knew him personally, and as an equally keen shock to those who have followed his fantasy tales for the past eight years in the fantasy magazines. Malcolm Jameson will long be missed and remembered.

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134 FANTASY COMMENTATOR This-'n'-That This issue's expected crop of editorial miscellany continues the listing of 1944 books of fantasy fiction published in the United States from where it was abruptly terminated in the last issue... Beth Brown's Universal Station (Regent House, $2 3/4) is a somewhat sentimentalized treatment of the life-after-death theme, and is quite entertainingly written. The World Healer by Paul M. Kourenoff ($2 1/2 from the author) tells of "the future of medicine in 199-" in fictional guise. If old Irish legends appeal to you, try the modern versions of several as presented in John Bayley's Forty Heads (Day, $3). No less than three volumes in the genre have appeared under the authorship of Eric Linklater, all published by the Macmillan Company: The Wind on the Moon ($2 3/4), a rather dilute Alice-in-Wonderland tale; Crisis in Heaven ($1 1/2), a play of Elysium, with resurrected historical characters: The Great Ship and Rabalais Replies ($1 1/4), the latter play in which is on the very similar lines. The second of Vardis Fisher's fine series of novels about prehistoric man is The Golden Rooms (Vanguard, $2 1/2), which is must reading for those who like the theme treated. Worlds Beginning by Robert Ardrey (Duell Sloane & Pierce, $2 1/2) is a tale of the future. And in the biographical field, two authors of imaginative fiction gain mention: Arthur E. Morgan's Edward Bellamy (Columbia, $5) and Joseph D. Bennett's Baudelaire (Princeton, $2); the latter volume is the first in English to deal at any length with Baudelaire's poetry. The most interesting items on the agenda of the pocketbook publishers are Penguin's two (still in print), Tales of Piracy, Crime and Ghosts by Daniel Defoe, and William Sloane's To Walk the Night; and if you missed the recent omnibus volume of Steven Vincent Benet's work, Penguin has a sampling of it ready for you in O'Halloran's Luck and other Short Stories. Bart House has followed its first collection of Lovecraft tales with a second, The Dunwich Horror, which contains two other works of this great author in addition. A few months ago The Face in the Abyss joined the five previous Merritt novels under the Avon House banner; The Ship of Ishtar is expected to follow this in August, with The Metal Monster scheduled for Spring of 1946... All these sell for 25 cents. So far this year but four new titles of fantasy have come to your editor's attention: an American reprint of the British Fireman Flower and Other Stories (Vanguard, $2 1/2); the misnamed Collected Stories of Ben Hecht (Crown, $3) ---this being but a brief selection of Hecht's shorter tales---which contains two of the fantasies from the author's earlier Book of Miracles; Robert Frost's allegorical play A Masque of Reason (Holt, $2); and from Britian a supernatural novel by Oliver Onions titled The Story of Ragged Robyn (Joseph, 8/6). Of interest to those of Commentator's readers having interest in interplanetary travel are three books on rocketry that have recently appeared: Eugen Sanger;s Raketen-Flugtechnik (Edwards, $5), Hermann Oberth's Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (3. aufl. of Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen) (Edwards, $8) and The Coming Age of Rocket Power (Harper, $3 1/2) by G. Edward Pendray. The former two are reprints of the original German editions, and Mr. Pendray is probably better known to most fantasy fans as "Gawain Edwards," under which pseudonym he wrote some science-fiction a few years back... Acknowledgements are hereby made to C. J. Fern, Jr., who contributed several of the titles of new books mentioned in last Fantasy Commentator's editorial, and to The Burning Glass, from whose pages Joyce Mayday's brief book reviews in this number were taken... "By-Products," also in this number, appears at a sadly appropriate moment: I am grieved to say that it is probably the last of the author's articles to be published, for on April 16th last its author passed away. His death came as a not-unexpected blow to those who knew him personally, and as an equally keen shock to those who have followed his fantasy tales for the past eight years in the fantasy magazines. Malcolm Jameson will long be missed and remembered.