Frankly, I don’t hear the word "bumbershoot" often enough nowadays.
Just scanning some books for use on a flyer we’ll be handing out at a paperback book show this coming week, and thought I’d share them with you here. I was looking for a couple of images that would stand out as a black and white image and reduced in size, and I thought the high contrast — the dark background and the brightly-colored spaceship — on this first cover would work nicely:
I’m not seeing a whole lot of legroom in that ship, but it’s still a pretty neat image.
And this second cover I picked because I thought those eyes would really grab your attention:
I haven’t read this book, so I gotta ask…are those propellers those spacemen have attached to their suits? How do those work in space, exactly?
This next book isn’t one I’m using for the flyer, but one I’m simply keeping for myself, because, well…
…here, let me transcribe the blurb from the back cover:
“Professor J. Adrian Fillmore was a collector of strange antiques. Little did he know that when he bought the odd umbrella he would become a collector of strange adventures.
“Pulled by the magical bumbershoot through realms of Victorian fantasy, Fillmore stumbled on the Frankenstein monster…a world of genies…Gilbert and Sullivan extravaganzas…Dracula…even Sherlock Holmes!
“Fillmore searched for the umbrella’s inventor, Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ archenemy…only to confront the most treacherous villain in the maddest, most frightening cosmos of them all.”
SOLD. Sure, it had me with “magical bumbershoot,” but I’m also a sucker for parodies/pastiches/alternate takes on Sherlock Holmes, so this book was right up my alley.
(For more paperback book covers of varying vintage, may I recommend pal Dorian’s Paperback Book Club?)
The Colors of Space (Monarch Books Inc., 1963, 1st printing)
The Falling Torch (Pyramid Books, 1959, 1st printing)
The Incredible Umbrella (Dell, 1980, 1st paperback edition)
