It’s a week since we returned from our latest trip to our by now practically second home Morecambe, that curious blend of urban decay and mellow repose.

As usual, we returned home burdened with bellies full of booze and tucker and several bags of second-hand books from The Old Pier Book Shop, the market book stall and the Carnforth Book Shop up the road in… well… in Carnforth.

And what a haul we bagged!

From the Old Pier we came away with another Graham Masterton, a potential one-shit book and a whole raft of Edgar Rice Burroughs…

..including these three Frank Frazetta illustrated hardcover doubles…

…ugh… marvellous. Black and white Frazetta art inside too.

There is, of course, a consequence to this. Now I have to find the other three volumes to complete the set.

Meanwhile, over at the market, I plugged a few gaps in the Survivalist series I started collecting a year or two ago.

I finally started reading the first of these a few days ago. It’s entertaining. Pulp trash for sure but I can’t stop reading. For a series so fixated on WW3 it’s also pretty ill-informed about a few things, but the author Jerry Ahern certainly does love his guns. In fact, he’s an out-and-out gun nerd, which just makes them all the funnier when, after describing in intricate detail the hero’s handguns right down to the grip, he shows amazing ignorance of other details (best example so far is a couple of nuclear submarines under an ice cap torpedoing each other and causing a 72 (SEVENTY-TWO) megaton explosion. It’s refreshingly short on racist tropes so far and, as it reads like the creative writing of a 13-year-old growing up in the 80s, it’s all very charming so far.

Over at Carnforth we picked up a lovely little trio of Sphere Conans. The Sphere editions were my introduction to Two-Gun Bob’s creation so I have a soft spot for them even though they are the de Camp and Carter adulterated texts or, in these cases, entirely new stories. Inferr yes, but nevertheless part of my Conan head-canon thanks to Pops.

As well as the Conans, a trio of M John Harrisons (which reminds me we need to cover The Pastel City at some point)…

Just look at that Centauri Device cover. So dynamic.

The Carnforth Book Shop, whilst perhaps not quite as extensive with SF and fantasy as The Old Pier, is an absolute trove thanks largely to its being much better organised.

I could have come away with a lot more but with the steely resolve of Conan himself (or being too lazy to carry any more as we were on the bus) I limited myself to just another four, including a John Brunner, a Thomas M Disch, a bloody lovely Dunsany and a tatty old British UFO exposé.

Just need time to read them all now. Which I’ll never get. But fuck it, finding these beauties is all part of the fun and I’ll retire one day…

one day…

one day…

…

Anyway. I’m on with editing the latest episode after finishing this report – The Sword of the Dawn Book Two with Dave -and it’s a tricky bugger thanks to some bizarre audio issues where we went out of sync during recording and ended up like an old trans-Atlantic interview complete with time delays in hearing each other. I’ll conquer it though.

And last night Graham and I jumped into D&Ts to discuss our latest Uncosy Catastrophe with The Fungus so that will be emerging in a couple of weeks too.

That’s it for now though, I’d better drink coffee and crack on wrestling with audio files.

Take care, stay safe and we will of course bump into each other again soon… on the moonbeam roads.