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Reading the Pulps #5: Visual Memory and Nostalgia
Is an aspect of nostalgia an ache to see things we once owned or coveted? On Facebook, there are countless groups where members post images driven by nostalgia. At Space Opera Pulp over eleven thousand people enjoy pictures from old science fiction books and pulp magazines covers. Raypunk, which has a modern slant has over twenty-three thousand members. There are photo nostalgia groups of all kinds. I also belong to ones that remember old movies, westerns, cars, mid-century houses, graphic artists, Baby Boomer memorabilia, etc. I don’t know why, but some of the most nostalgically powerful images for me are old book and magazine covers.
I recently created a cover gallery, “The Hardback Legacy of Astounding Science Fiction” for my blog. It was an excuse to gather .jpg images of all the first edition books that reprinted content from Astounding Science Fiction magazine (1930-1960). I love looking at artwork that illustrated old science fiction stories. For that post, I narrowed it down to hardbacks. Some people have commented they remember the same books by their paperback covers. Then last night on Young Sheldon I saw Sheldon reading a copy of I, Robot with the cover I had for the Science Fiction Book Club edition I first read. Man, that released a flood of nostalgia-chemicals in my brain. I wonder how many older viewers had a deep twinge of longing for the past when they saw that scene?
Are the covers we remember most the ones we saw first?
Shown above, is how I remember I, Robot. When I look at all the other covers for I, Robot they don’t tweak my nostalgia like this SFBC edition cover. I even wonder if I’m nostalgic for the stories at all, but instead long to see the book I once held while enjoying the stories?
I use two ways to find cover images. The first one, which is the quickest method, is with a Google search then clicking the image tab. The results look like this:
Google tends to get the most popular images, and often throws in stuff that’s not related. The way below was created using ISFDB.org. It requires typing a query into its database, and sometimes it takes a little skill. Regular use will reveal it’s tricks. First, find the main entry for the book you want by typing in the title and then selecting “Fiction Titles.” Hit Go. Click the title link to the proper entry. Then scroll down to the bottom of that list and click on all “View all covers for …” Here are the early covers for I, Robot in publication order. Click on the link to see all.
This got me to thinking. Is a big aspect of nostalgia related to what we owned or wanted to own when we were teens? Even if its something popular before our teen years? I turned 13 the year the Ford Mustang and Plymouth Barracuda came out in 1964. So images of 1960s muscle cars light up my nostalgia neurons. Generally, pictures of anything that happened in the 1960s turn on my nostalgia. But so do images from 1930s movies and 1940s pulp magazines, things that came out way before I was born. What explains that? They are past pop culture I learned to love in my teens. Why do we imprint so strongly what we experienced from age 10-20? Why don’t I have nostalgia for stuff I discovered in my forties? Maybe I will in my eighties.
My friend Mike told me how he loved a paperback copy of Beyond Tomorrow, a paperback anthology edited by Damon Knight, which he said he read to pieces. That made me remember something else. I love covers from many science fiction books, but I’m always partial to the editions I first read.
For example, I hate seeing any cover for the twelve Heinlein juveniles except those from the original publisher Charles Scribners Sons. However, I do accept the covers from the pulp digest magazines where the stories first appeared. When I started collecting pulp magazines the first thing I did was collect the mags that contained stories by Heinlein.
Thus, these are the acceptable images I have for Have Space Suit-Will Travel. By the way, Worlds Without End causes me endless memory heartache because they often use covers I don’t associate with a title. If you click on the title link above you’ll see one I particularly dislike. In fact, I dislike all the covers for Have Space Suit-Will travel but these two:
They were both done by Emsh (Ed Emshwiller). Do you also have this hangup about book covers? If so, leave a comment. I’m curious how visual memories affect other people.
Someone commented on my blog that they remember the paperback covers instead because they didn’t buy hardbacks or get science fiction from the library. I remember having several sources of science fiction. First were library books I got at school, or the Homestead Air Force Base Library or the downtown main branch of the Miami Public Library. This is where I saw all those first edition hardbacks I show off on my blog. That’s why I remember hardbacks along with paperbacks.
When I began making my own money in the 9th grade mowing lawns and having a paper route, I started going to used bookstores on my bike or buying new paperbacks off of twirling racks in drugstores. Used bookstores are where I began seeing old paperbacks and digest pulp magazines covers that have been burned into my brain. In the tenth grade, I joined the Science Fiction Book Club and began collecting hardback editions. Their covers are also etched deep in my memories. My formative mind imprinted on those covers and I’m now haunted by them. I wonder how long this bout of nostalgia will last?
Joachim Boaz has been tweeting photos of his bookshelves. Not only does this trigger nostalgia, but envy. In my lifetime I’ve owned thousands of books and magazines, but I’ve given most away. When I read the titles on Joachim’s shelves I see so many I once owned. His old paperbacks trigger so many memories. I wonder if Joachim is less nostalgic than I am because he owns all those books that I can only remember when I see a photograph.
SFFaudio also tweets and retweets images that often sets off my nostalgia. They also show a lot of interior art, as well as table-of-contents pages and images of pages to read from the past. From all the photos they tweet I can tell they also have the nostalgia flu.
Yesterday I went to the public library and went up and down the ranges that held their science fiction collection. Most of their science fiction is newer and I don’t remember those books at all. And the older books I do remember have later editions that look unfamiliar to me. Except for a few rare finds, this experienced evoked no nostalgia. It was sad. I had hoped to find books I saw on the shelves back in the 1960s, but they are long gone. I did find a third printing of the first edition of A Canticle for Leibowitz. And I found a couple early Brian Aldiss story collections from the 1960s.
Maybe another reason my mind responds so well to photos is that I have a poor visual memory. Well, my memory for stories is also poor. Maybe what I call nostalgia is just the pleasure of recall itself. I don’t know. But for the fun of it, here’s how I remember Robert A. Heinlein. Astute observers will notice I have no nostalgia for Heinlein after 1966.
JWH
Are You Nostalgic for Old SF Art?
I recently joined two groups on Facebook devoted to science fiction art: Raypunk and Space Opera Pulp. It makes me wonder: How many people love science fiction art? Over the years I’ve encountered a number of blogs devoted to SF art like Joachim Boaz’s Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations and 70s Sci-Fi Art. And more databases of covers from science fiction magazines are showing up, like The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from Phil Stephensen-Payne’s giant website. Even the Internet Science Fiction Database has become much more cover oriented. If you search Pinterest for “science fiction art” you’ll get countless collections.
Raypunk features more modern SF artwork but does include some older stuff. Space Opera Pulp is exactly what it says, and more to my nostalgic tastes. I would love to include samples of art these sites provide but I’m not sure about the rules of copyright violations.
It would be a wonderful blogging project to show the evolution of science fiction art as it parallels written science fiction. But I’m not sure how when it comes to getting permissions to use artwork. For now, I’m showing screenshots to these sites as a colorful enticement to try them. Here are some of the covers from F&SF. If you go to the site and click on a thumbnail it will show the large view. However, if you love a particular cover search for it on Google using the image view. Often larger higher resolution images are available.
For my personal use, I just right-click on images, select “Save image as…” and then put them into my SF Art folder. I search for the best scan at the highest resolution, and use my computer’s desktop background as an art gallery, using John’s Background Switcher to change images. It’s available for free and works on Windows and Mac. For Linux, I use Variety Wallpaper Changer. These programs automatically switch desktop background images at set time intervals. Here’s what my current desktop looks like:
One idea for a visual essay would be to take a single topic, say Mars, and show how fiction and illustrations have changed over time. Go year-by-year describing stories, quoting them, and showing the illustrations. Of course, that’s just another project to put on my pile of projects-to-do, but it would be fun. If anyone knows about the copyright laws that would apply to such a project, leave a comment, please.
Another project would be to pick one artist, say Richard Powers, and show how their work changed with the science fiction times. ISFDB makes that easy. They list books by cover artist. I assume showing whole book covers are kosher when it comes to copyright.
That should allow a project showing all the covers for a particular book. Here’s the ISFDB page for Have Space Suit-Will Travel. It goes on and on.
But really, how many fans of SF art are out there? Is it in the hundreds, the thousands? I can’t imagine it in the tens of thousands, but maybe. Wouldn’t it be funny to find out if 167 people keep all those SF art websites going? I think they must come in two kinds. The folks that love the current work, and the folks that are nostalgic like me.
I think that because I believe that’s how people read science fiction. When you’re young you read new science fiction to imagine the future. When you’re old you read the old science fiction you loved when young and think about the past.
Here’s the desktop image as I finished this essay.
CoolVibe is a Cool Site
In case you’ve never seen it CoolVibe is indeed a cool site for genre fiction fans. From their about page:
Coolvibe is a site dedicated to showcasing the best and most inspirational digital art from around the web — be it science fiction, fantasy, retro, 3D, illustrations, vector art, and virtually everything else.
Case in point is this wicked cool Steampunk Iron Man by Mateusz Ozminski, an artist from Poland. The range of styles on CoolVibe is wide and eclectic so you’re sure to find something there that you’ll like. Check ’em out.
