Clarkesworld Magazine - Issue 22 by Margaret Ronald & Sergey Gerasimov & Lisa Morton & Neil Clarke

Author:Margaret Ronald & Sergey Gerasimov & Lisa Morton & Neil Clarke [Ronald, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2008-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

About the Author

Sergey Gerasimov lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine with his wife and daughter. He has a degree in theoretical physics from Kharkiv University and has sold twelve novels and nearly a hundred stories in Russia and Ukraine. This is his fifth story published in English. Previous stories appeared Adbusters, #68 and #71.

Smart Broads and Tough Guys: The Strange World of Vintage Paperbacks

Lisa Morton

It all started with Lance Casebeer.

In the late 60s, a man with a name that sounded as if it’d come straight from a cheap crime novel started collecting old paperbacks. Casebeer, who’d once been a comic book dealer, traded one expendable pop culture item for another, and in 1976 he started sharing his obsession with other collectors. That was the year he inaugurated Lance-Con, the first annual gathering devoted solely to vintage paperbacks; for the next quarter-of-a-century, Lance-Con would continue to be held in Casebeer’s Portland, Oregon home, drawing up to 200 bibliomaniacs yearly. Most came to buy, trade, or sell, and all came to appreciate Casebeer’s collection, which by 2000 was the only complete collection of all paperbacks published between 1938 and 1968. During these gatherings, the almost-exclusively middle-aged men would spill over into the backyards of Casebeer’s neighbors, exchanging esoteric bits of information on their favorite authors, or arguing whether there were more paperback covers featuring Marilyn Monroe or gorillas (that was a real contest Casebeer had once entered into, and he had the roomful of Monroe books to prove he’d won). Each Lance-Con culminated with a group dinner, usually featuring Casebeer’s notorious purple turkeys, some locally hired entertainers, and a lot of kegs.

Casebeer, who died in 2003, also published a newsletter, Collecting Paperbacks, and probably helped to establish vintage paperbacks — which up until the 80s had been largely ignored by most antiquarian booksellers — as legitimate collectibles. Well, if these little jewels, once considered wholly disposable and featuring authors with names like Vin Packer and Gil Brewer, can be said to have any legitimacy whatsoever.

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