Quote:
Originally Posted by Phogg
Well, back in the seventies we were stuck with the selection that showed up in the library, or the tiny bookstores at the mall. Occaisionally we might get to go into the nearest real city to a big used bookstore, but most of the time science fiction and fantasy readers read everything that came in because our genre wasn't terribly catered to. We still had periods with nothing new in the genre.
Ergot we often read stuff that was awful, hoping it would somehow get better. Some of it absolutely refused to get better no matter how many books were put out.
As an aside, I think Terry Brooks only sold as well as he did because his hardbacks came with Brothers Hildebrandt posters.
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I was in high school at the time, so I wasn't picky in the least about what I read. I was poor, though, and had to save up for a few weeks to buy any must-have paperbacks. Hardbacks were just not worth it. But you reminded me that I used to stand in the bookstores staring covetously at the hardback copies of "Sword of Shannara" because they had those posters, just as you said! It was probably a good thing I couldn't buy every crappy new book with a nice cover that came out at that time, because I surely would have.
I do remember actually clipping out some catalogs in the backs of sci-fi novels and sending in money orders via snail mail to buy some Andre Norton books they didn't sell in our local shops. I was half expecting to achieve reading bliss, half expecting to just get ripped off by the publishers (I had ordered some of those gizmos advertised in comic books before, thus knew all about mail fraud
). So, I was always happy and a bit surprized when the books actually arrived by mail a few months later. Buying ebooks online is so much better nowadays, but I'm finding myself feeling a bit nostalgic over those times.