Paperback 1154: The 1,000-Year Plan / Isaac Asimov (Ace D-110)

Paperback 1154: Ace D-110 (1st ptg, 1955)

Title: The 1,000-Year Plan

Author: Isaac Asmiov

Cover artist: Ed Valigursky

Condition: 7/10    

Value: $10    

[gift from a reader]

Best things about this cover: 

• John Houseman is ... Mr. Clean in ... The 1,000-Year Plan! 
• Is he just wearing a shitty t-shirt with a worn-out collar? How am I supposed to take Captain Eyebrows here seriously if he can't even keep his uniform tight.
• "Sir, we have a plan for waxing your head?" "Fantastic, how long will it take?" 
• Weirdly, this book was released both as one half of an Ace Double paperback (also numbered D-110, with Poul Anderson's No World of Their Own as the flip side) and in this standalone format. I have no idea why.

Best things about this back cover: 

• That's a nice shade of blue, I guess.

Page 123~

"A priest is at the head. He has been identified as High Priest Poly Verisof. He demands the immediate release of Mayor Salvor Hardin and cessation of the war against the Foundation."

Those names! Was this originally written as space porn? Come on. You're gonna tell me that these characters weren't originally named Polly VerySoft and Salvor Hard-On? I don't believe it.

~RP

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Paperback 1153: A Murder Is Announced / Agatha Christie (Pocket Books 820)

Paperback 1153: Pocket Books 820 (1st ptg, 1951)

Title: A Murder Is Announced

Author: Agatha Christie

Cover artist: Frank McCarthy

Condition: 8/10

Value: $10    

Best things about this cover: 

• When your CPR compressions are *way* too hard...
• Lady looks like she's competing in some kind of haunted house biathlon, and losing
• Dead guy's right hand is gonna haunt my dreams for days. I count five fingers, but somehow it looks like seven

Best things about this back cover: 

• Ah, the classified ads. I miss those. People advertising help wanted, selling furniture, announcing murders. The good old days.
• Pretty close to Halloween to being going to strange women's houses. Particularly strange women named Letitia Blacklock. Oh, did the lights go out? Were you "locked" in "blackness"? What did you expect to happen!? 
• God bless Pocket Books for the artist credit. Love an artist credit. Hate having to track artists down (or, worse, and more common, not being able to find out who did the art at all)

Page 123~

"If you'd been up against it, and then, rather like a shivering stray cat, you'd found a home and cream and a warm stroking hand and you were called Pretty Pussy and somebody thought the world of you ... You'd do a lot to keep that ..."

Boy, would I. You got that right.

~RP

P.S. My long winter hiatus is over. Gonna try to stick to a regular T/Th publishing sched. for the foreseeable future, with possible weekend posts if I have the time. Thank you to loyal readers. Tell a friend! xo

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Paperback 1152: Murder on the Links / Agatha Christie (Dell 454)

Paperback 1152: Dell 454 (1st ptg, 1950)

Title: Murder on the Links

Author: Agatha Christie

Cover artist: Al Brulé

Condition: 7/10    

Value: $10

Best things about this cover: 

• I'm sorry but the freakiest thing about this cover isn't Poirot standing in the doorway, it's whatever that get-up is that she's got on, holy cow.
• Carhop? Ballerina? Working as a waitress in a cocktail bar?
• Those are the gapingest fishnets I ever did see. Reasonable-sized fish could escape through those holes.
• Classic Fear Hand! Or else she's telling Poirot, "Just give me five minutes, you impatient Walloon!"
• In other news, I think 2026 might be My Christie Year. I know a year isn't nearly enough to read all her novels, but I'm hoping maybe I can polish off a dozen, at least.

Best things about this back cover: 

• Mapback!! Paperback design peaked with the mapback. All downhill since then. Every book should have a map on the back. If I started a publishing co., this would be the one and possibly only thing I cared about.
• Look at the detail. Tiny cabanas and beach chairs and umbrellas and everything.
• LOL "Bench." Thanks, map!
• Love the perspective on this one, with Calais visible in the far distance. And clouds! It's lovely, really.
• "Copes" is a weird word to describe what Poirot does. He's solving a case, not surviving a week-end with his in-laws.

Page 123~

    But at that moment a stir and bustle was heard outside, and our old friend, the examining magistrate, accompanied by his clerk and M. Bex, with the doctor behind them, came bustling in.

OK, a couple things. First, M. Bex, cool name. Second, was there no editor to say "absolutely not" to the repetition of "bustle"? "Bustling" almost seems like an intentional comical callback to "stir and bustle," but if that were so, I'd expect all the people to come "stirring and bustling in." "Bustling" on its own gives the appearance of laziness (both authorial and editorial).

~RP

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Paperback 1151: The Body in the Library / Agatha Christie (Pocket Books 341)

Paperback 1151: Pocket Books 341 (3rd ptg, 1946)

Title: The Body in the Library

Author: Agatha Christie

Cover artist: Uncredited

Condition: 8.5/10

Value: $10

Best things about this cover: 

• People say she's crazy, she's got diamonds on the ... what is that, the lap of her dress?
• The sparkly bits are actually gorgeous, though this poor woman has fallen in a rather unbecoming way. More abstract shape than human form. The absolutely ridiculous wig-hair is not helping (if you look at the image upside-down, it looks even sillier, like her wig is sliding back off her scalp)
• Condition on this book is fantastic. Slight spine lean, and maybe a little spine fading, but otherwise the book is bright. Immaculate. The perma-gloss is intact and everything.

Best things about this back cover: 

• If the cover is making you a little seasick because everything's a little ... tilty, that's because of a printing anomaly. Sometimes with early paperbacks the printing, particularly on covers, is not perfectly square or centered. I find it charming. 
• "Hearthrug" is a weird-looking word. Like three words fighting to be the main word and all of them somehow losing.
• I don't know what color that "backless evening dress" is on the cover, but it ain't white.
• I love the idea that a dead body on a hearthrug looks merely "incongruous" in the Colonel's library. "Her corpse clashes with the escritoire. Oh, no, this won't do at all."

Page 123~

    Florence looked uneasily at Miss Marple. Her eyes looked rather like those of one of her father's calves.

    Miss Marple said, "Sit down, Florence."

~RP

Oh my god is Miss Marple gonna slaughter her. "We were supposed to have veal for dinner this evening, Florence, but your father has no more calves available. Which brings us to the question of why I've brought you here..."

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Paperback 1150: The Hollow / Agatha Christie (Pocket Books 485)

Paperback 1150: Pocket Books 485 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: The Hollow

Author: Agatha Christie

Cover artist: Uncredited

Condition: 8/10

Value: $10

[Still more Agatha Christie from this summer, Autumn Leaves, Ithaca, NY, 2025]

Best things about this cover: 

• She criticized his taste in statuary once too often!
• She criticized his Brylcrem obsession once too often!
• "Hold still, darling, while I smother you in THE HOLLOW of my neck"
• Man they are really doing battle for "worst hair."
• Huh. It doesn't look like he "inspires dangerous passion" so much as he "lavishes unwanted attention on women such that they are inspired to drive knitting needles into his neck."
• What are those things in her hand, anyway? I honestly have no guess. Part knitting needles part riding crop part busted umbrella. Whatever it is, I assume she's about to plant it right in his cherubic face.

Best things about this back cover: 

• Most accusations "for all to hear" are not "whispered," in my admittedly limited experience of guys dying near swimming pools.
• This is a pretty weak teaser. Also, a truly unnecessary explanation of what Hercule Poirot is going to do. "Oh, is he going to ask questions and gain insight into the character of suspects!? How novel!"
• I'm no legal scholar, but I'm pretty sure that a detective cannot "convict the guilty one."

Page 123~

"Oh, Gudgeon," said Lady Angkatell, "about those eggs. I meant to write the date in pencil on them as usual. Will you ask Mrs. Medway to see to it?"

This book is truly committed to insane names. Gerda and Gudgeon and Angkatell, and then of course there's Henrietta: "Henrietta Savernake [!] — a talented sculptress who sometimes cheats at cards" (per the "Cast of Characters"). As long as one of them writes the damn date on the damn eggs, I'm sure everything will be fine.

~RP

P.S. sorry for the two-week hiatus. Surgery + a cold + a threefold increase in teaching responsibilities really put me back on my heels. But I'm back at it now, 2-3x week for the foreseeable future.

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Paperback 1149: Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective / Agatha Christie (Dell 550)

Paperback 1149: Dell 550 (1st ptg, 1951)

Title: Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective

Author: Agatha Christie

Cover artist: Rafael de Soto

Condition: 7+/10

Value: $8

[Autumn Leaves, Ithaca, NY, summer '25]

Best things about this cover: 

• Hey, alright, balding middle-aged bespectacled guy gets to be semi-heroic. You don't see that every day.
• This lady is really bringing the hand action. Fear Hand™ reaching out toward us, while the other hand clutches her throat. Meanwhile, the guy's hands are also pretty busy, one of them holding and guiding the young woman, the other holding a handkerchief to his face (surely a more effective survival strategy than self-strangulation)
• I assumed they were fighting their way through poisoned gas, but maybe it's just a smoke from a fire. But if it was a fire, I assume we'd be getting more clearly FIRE iconography. Where are the flames? Since when do fires give off a kind of mauve miasma?
• Rafael de Soto was one of the artists who jumped from pulps to paperbacks, and you can really see the pulp expertise here. So good at conveying drama and action, so many nice little details—the wrinkles in his brow, for instance, or her bracelet, or his surprisingly stylish purple tie. If he's gonna die, he's gonna die in style! 

Best things about this back cover: 

• Mapback! God bless Dell for the Mapback period. Every back cover a cartological adventure!
• If ever there was an image of imperialism ... Great Britain is barely on this map, but the Houses of Parliament, seem to have invaded and absolutely crushed eastern Europe and Russia.
• The iconography is perfect. Paris has the Arc de Triomphe, Britain has Parliament, Turkey's got minarets, Egypt's got pyramids, and then there's Iraq, which is represented, of course, by its world famous bus.

Page 123~

    "Oh, yes! Edward's a perfect angel." She hesitated. "Not, perhaps, very much go to him. Just a little—well, I'd call it strait-laced. Lot of Puritan ancestry and all that. But he's a dear," she added hastily.

"Where oh where did my go go? Why is it so low? I'll never know"—Edward

~RP

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Paperback 1148: Murder at Hazelmoor / Agatha Christie (Dell 937)

Paperback 1148: Dell 937 (1st ptg, 1957)

Title: Murder at Hazelmoor

Author: Agatha Christie

Cover artist: Milton Glaser

Condition: 8/10 

Value: $12

[Part of my Big Christie Haul from Autumn Leaves, late summer '25]

Best things about this cover: 

• Look, I know there's not a lot going on in this painting, but the more I look at it, the cooler it gets. It's by legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser (creator of the I 🩷 NY logo among many other iconic images), and the composition and details are really compelling if you give them the time of day.
• I love the tiny details, like the fringe on the rug, and the two little untied laces. The tread on the heels of those shoes is also amazing. Those shoes seem expensive, as do those (exquisite) socks.
• The dude's pants, though, are the coup de grâce. They are perfectly, stiffly triangular. No wrinkles, no folds, an impossible fabric that defies gravity and gives the whole picture an air of whimsy (and despite all the murder in Christie stories, whimsy is never far off)

Best things about this back cover: 

• Oh hell yes, Mapback (advent calendar edition)!
• Look at those damned trees. The little stylized trees holding up perfect little arcs of snow. Where do you find those? Probably the same place you find those pants on the cover. And the little gingerbread houses, and the stars. Gorgeous.
• I know (from the cover of another version of this same paperback) that there's a seance involved, and I'm newly obsessed with seances and hauntings and ghosts and people's belief in ghosts, so I think I'll put this away and save it for a nice midwinter read. Something to lighten the gloom of midwinter.

Page 123~

    "The only other person in the village is Captain Wyatt. He smokes opium, I believe. And he's easily the worst-tempered man in England. Anything more you want to know?"

    "I don't think so," said Emily. "What you have told me seems pretty comprehensive."

Disagree. I need to know more about Captain Wyatt right now. He sounds fascinating.

~RP

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