The Old Dark Arthouse made an excursion to Alameda today for the monthly flea market on the old Navy base. It's always been huge and though perhaps it's just the summer season, it seemed a good deal larger today than ever.

This flea market is always good for paper collecting. I never walk away from it without at least a few TV Guides for UHF Nocturne, and indeed today I found 20 for a buck each, all from 1965 - 1973. There's some choice stuff in them I haven't had time to scan yet. These were found very near the end of a great run of finds.

At one of the first stalls we browsed, I met this lovely thing, who cost me only $2. There's a suction cup in the base, and the text reads "Test Your Sex Appeal Try To Pick Me Up With One Hand." Presumably, the one hand that gets the most exercise. She now has a place in my bathroom medicine cabinet, ever available to test my sex appeal.

Not long after, we found a vendor with about a dozen flats of vintage paperbacks, at $1 each. It was all prime stuff, and I had to pass on a lot of things that would have been nice to own - including some James Bond paperbacks which predated the classic 1960s Signet editions of the series, and some rarer 60s spy stuff. (One's obsessions must be managed in good time, and at the moment I'm trying to stick with my 1930s reading list.) However, I could not resist a few choice items, including this Frank Edwards paperback which was one of the first strange-but-true books I read way back in my early teens when UFOs and true monster mysteries were the most important topics I could imagine.

I have been meaning to read Eric Hoffer's The True Believer for a long while now, and could not resist picking up a vintage edition for a buck.

This TV tie-in edition of the first Honey West novel would have been $8 or more on eBay.

Among the bins were scattered examples of 60s-vintage erotica.

The Sin Damned is from 1960. The imprint Nightstand Books was a Wm. Hamling enterprise, and well known in pulp circles for employing Harlan Ellison among other SF writers as work-for-hire authors under various pseudonyms. A quick scan hints at a tameness which may keep me from ever reading it through.

Flesh Search is from 1966, though it may be a reprint of an earlier work, as it seems just as tame overall as The Sin Damned.

Suburb Sex Club looks to be the best of the three. It's from 1968, by which time written erotica had become quite a bit more explicit than in the early 60s. It takes the form of a sociological report on the phenomenon of wife swapping.

If the next item had been my only purchase, the day would have been a resounding success. I passed on this LP many years ago when it was new, but only began to regret it in the last 10 years or so. The dealer knew what it was worth, particularly in the excellent condition it is in, and yet let me have it for $15.

And finally, at the dealer next to the stall where the Nimoy album was found, this lost masterpiece lay waiting. The painting's about 18" x 15" and now brightens the lobby of the The Old Dark Arthouse.