Best of
Collections
1953
Untouched By Human Hands
Robert Sheckley - 1953
(1st serialized in Galaxy, '58)."The Monsters" (F&SF 1953/3) "Cost of Living" (Galaxy 1952/12) "The Altar" (Fantastic 1953/7&8) "Keep Your Shape" (Galaxy 1953/11; aka Shape) "The Impacted Man" (Astounding 1952/12) "Untouched by Human Hands" (Galaxy 1953/12; aka One Man's Poison) "The King's Wishes" (F&SF 1953/7) "Warm" (Galaxy 1953/6) "The Demons" (Fantasy Magazine 1953/3) "Specialist" (Galaxy 1953/5) "Seventh Victim" (Galaxy 1953/4--later expanded"Ritual" (Climax 1953; aka Strange Ritual) "Beside Still Waters" (Amazing 1953/10&11)
Kovels' New Dictionary of Marks: Pottery and Porcelain 1850 to Present
Ralph Kovel - 1953
Kovels' New Dictionary of Marks: 1850 to the Present will help you identify your pieces.Kovels' New Dictionary of Marks provides the quickest and easiest way for professional and amateur collectors to identify more than 3,500 American, European, and Oriental marks. The perfect companion to the Kovels' original best-seller, Kovels' Dictionary of Marks -- Pottery and Porcelain: 1650 to 1850 (still in print after more than 42 years and 41 printings), Kovels' New Dictionary of Marks is the most comprehensive reference for nineteenth- and twentieth-century marks. Together, the two volumes are an indispensable guide to porcelain and pottery marks of the last four centuries.Also available from Three Rivers Press, Kovels' Dictionary of Marks--Pottery & Porcelain: 1650 to 1850
One Woman's Year
Stella Martin Currey - 1953
The book is dedicated to Tirzah Garwood (then Ravilious and later Swanzy) but the woodcuts are not by her because she had died two years before. They were done by a friend, Malcolm Ford (who, like Stella Martin Currey’s husband, taught at Colchester Royal Grammar School).These are the contents for January: there is a quotation, as there is before every month, from the British Merlin (1677), an Almanac known nowadays as Rider’s British Merlin. It starts ‘This is the Season for good husbands to lop and prune superfluous Branches and Fruit trees’ and ends: ‘The best physick is warm diet, warm Cloaths, good Fires, and a merry, honest Wife.’ Then there is a ten-page essay on ‘Books for the Family’. Of course it is now a bit out of date, but the mention of Pamela Brown, Eve Garnett and Belloc’s Cautionary Verses (among dozens of good suggestions) can never be dismissed. After this is a funny piece about a visit to the hairdresser. Next there are a few pages about a burst pipe, a cake recipe, a description of A Visit to the Tower of London, an extract from Jane Eyre and finally an extract from our own Tea with Mr Rochester.November again has an extract from the British Merlin (‘Set Crab Tree stocks to graft on’), eight pages on the art of embroidery (‘One of the loveliest and most lovable rooms I have ever seen had copies of old flower paintings and they were all embroidered in delicate stitches on very fine yellow silk… Another fascinating adventure in embroidery is to copy an old map’). Then there are suggestions for a Guy Fawkes Party (‘sausage rolls, gingerbread men, conspirator biscuits and toffee’), a quite detailed piece on ‘deciding whether you can eat the mushrooms which grow in the garden’, a recipe for the said biscuits (you cut them to look like conspirators), a short piece on visiting an art gallery with children (pick out the animals eg. the little dog in The Arnolfini Portrait, the dragon in St George and the Dragon), an extract from Elizabeth and her German Garden by our very own Elizabeth von Arnim, and finally an extract from Emma.But it was her novelist’s eye and ear that makes One Woman’s Year such a gem. In between the sometimes period details are many extremely useful pieces on dressing-up boxes, phrases to be used in thank-you letters, an extract from The Young Visiters, or which flowers to have in vases for every month of the year. One cannot imagine anyone who would not find this book both useful and endearing.
The Shapes Of Midnight
Joseph Payne Brennan - 1953
Hear me! Or don't. For there are those obsessed with uncovering the witcheries that fester in man's foul heart. There are those who would invoke the awful powers that yet remain in Earth's cursed places. Joseph Payne Brenna is such a one. This is his book. Dare you make it yours? (back cover copy)Introduction by Stephen King.Contents:Diary of a Werewolf The Corpse of Charlie Rull Canavan’s Back Yard The Pavilion House of Memory The Willow Platform Who Was He?DisappearanceThe Horror at Chilton CastleThe Impulse to KillThe House on Hazel StreetSlime