You all remember the story of Aladdin’s cave, don’t you?
The magician who shows Aladdin the marble slab in the desert, with the copper ring set into it, and tells him that if he seizes the ring and raises the slab, a fabulous treasure will be his, for he alone can lift the slab. The staircase of twelve steps, leading down into a great cave in the earth. The four rooms containing gold and silver jars; the fourth room with the door leading into a garden; the trees whose fruits were rubies and emeralds; and above all else the room beyond the garden where a lamp hangs from the ceiling, the lamp of wonders that can summon the powerful spirits known as the Slaves of the Lamp, who can grant all wishes—
This is the story of my own Aladdin’s Cave.
It’s an episode more than half a century old that I think will stir some emotion in the bosom of anyone who, like myself of long ago, found it exciting to collect the science fiction magazines of ancient days. The year was 1950. I had just turned fifteen. I was a high-school sophomore, a voracious reader of science fiction ever since I had come upon H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea when I was about ten. I had branched out, in the previous couple of years, from such classic authors as Wells and Verne to the rather less respectable pulp magazines of the day—first Weird Tales, which I discovered early in 1948, and then Amazing Stories, the following year, a magazine that I much preferred because I had the illusion that its stories were grounded in scientific speculation. (It would be another year or two before I came to see that dear old Amazing was just a trashy adventure-story magazine, whose stories were hardly more scientific in their orientation than the spooky fiction Weird traditionally offered.)
I couldn’t get enough of the stuff. You know the feeling, because you went through it yourself in those first glorious months after you stumbled into reading SF. I wanted to read every bit of it I could find. There wasn’t much science fiction being published then—just a handful of magazines and the very infrequent paperback. A few publishers were doing hardcover science fiction also, but of course I couldn’t afford those back then (three dollars was the cover price), and when I searched for them in the public library (where they were listed under the category of “pseudoscientific fiction” they were never there, probably already having been checked out by those wiseguy seventeen-year-olds who had discovered SF a few years ahead of me. So I went hunting for the back issues of Amazing and its companion Fantastic and the gaudily named Thrilling Wonder Stories and the other pulp SF magazines of the era.
New York City, where I lived then, was full of shops that dealt in back-issue magazines. I was already a regular customer of one, a musty place called Jackson’s, in a seedy corner of Brooklyn, where I had gone frequently in 1947 and 1948 to buy old copies of The National Geographic Magazine that aided me mightily in my homework. I hustled over there and asked Jackson—a creepy old character with bristly gray stubble all over his face—about science fiction magazines. He pointed across the room. There they were, a dime apiece, and I went tottering away with a tall stack of pulps, several dollars’ worth, issues going back two or three years.
But all Jackson had were the recent issues. I craved older stuff, four, five, even ten years old, issues that contained the classic stories that veteran readers still were raving about in the magazine letter columns. One day, visiting a friend who also had begun collecting SF magazines, I noticed that the cover of one of his recent acquisitions bore the rubber-stamped address of a shop in downtown Brooklyn. It might be worth investigating, I thought. Surreptitiously—because he and I were very competitive in amassing the old magazines—I jotted down the name of the store.
I think it was called The Curio Shop, though after all this time I’m not entirely sure of that. But graven on my memory forever is its address —106a Court Street. I hustled down there after school the next day, a short trip by subway from my home.
106a Court turned out to be a decrepit nineteenth-century building just at the edge of the downtown district, three or four blocks from the county courthouse that gives the street its name. I found myself in a long, narrow, dimly lit shop, cluttered from floor to ceiling with junk of all sorts—tables and chairs, pots and pans, bookcases, mismatched dishes, incomplete sets of silverware, and I know not what else. The proprietor, a gaunt, fierce-looking woman with grizzled gray hair, sat behind a desk just inside the front door. She gave me a quizzical look, as though wondering what a rosy-cheeked lad like me was doing in her bedraggled emporium.
I was pretty terrified. “Old science fiction magazines?” I managed to say.
“Downstairs.” She pointed to a staircase dimly visible toward the back of the shop. “Watch your head going down. The light’s on your left.”
The staircase was a rickety affair, and I had to crouch as I descended it. Some groping and I found the light switch. A faint bulb revealed a dusty realm of floor-to-ceiling odds and ends: more of the same junk as the upstairs room held, all piled higgledy-piggledy, everything crammed closely together, with only one narrow passage permitting entry. Cautiously I advanced, squinting in the dimness. And in flimsy bookshelves tucked under the staircase I came upon the rubies and emeralds of my Aladdin’s cave: heaps and heaps of science fiction magazines, some fairly recent, but most of them truly ancient ones! Dates like 1934 and 1930 and 1927 leaped out to dazzle my eyes. And not just a few magazines, but dozens—hundreds!
1934 and 1930 and 1927 must seem prehistoric to you—dates out of a time when your grandparents were little children. I assure you that those years seemed every bit as prehistoric to me, back there in 1950. Not only hadn’t I been born when those magazines were new, but most of them went back to a time when my parents hadn’t yet met. For me anything before around 1941 was prehistoric—practically paleolithic.
I barely knew where to begin. Over here was a stack that turned out to be a nearly complete file, covering the years from 1930 to 1933, of Astounding Stories of Super-Science, the remote ancestor of today’s Analog. In astonishment I pulled forth the incredibly rare first issue, January 1930. Nearby were scores of copies of Amazing Stories—not the shoddy-looking pulp magazine I was familiar with, but its slick jumbo-sized forebear, founded in 1926 by the legendary Hugo Gernsback, for whom today’s Hugo awards are named. Behind them were many issues of Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories, the successor magazines that Gernsback had started when a bankruptcy suit cost him control of Amazing, and beyond them were dozens of his later title, Wonder Stories, in both its pulp and slick formats. Everything was in splendid condition; some looked as though they had come straight from the newsstand. Somebody back there in the 1930s had collected science fiction magazines with zeal and had preserved them with great care, and then, perhaps, had gone off to war and never returned, and his family had sold the whole batch to The Curio Shop, where they had slumbered quietly down here until I came upon them.
Even now, seeing my teenage self darting from shelf to shelf in that congested cellar, I can feel my pulse rate rising. How I had coveted these ancient, fabled magazines! But I had never seriously expected to own them, or even just to hold them in my hands. Could I afford to buy them, I wondered? There were hundreds of them. My allowance was perhaps two dollars a week. A month or so before I had purchased, for fifty cents, a 1929 copy of Science Wonder Stories, missing its front and back covers, from a mail-order dealer on Staten Island. How much would these magazines, in practically perfect condition, cost me? Whatever it was, it was surely going to be beyond my reach.
I rushed upstairs. I must have been a wild-eyed figure, flushed, perspiring, covered with dust. Trying to be cool, I inquired after the price of the magazines downstairs.
“Some are half a dollar, some a quarter,” the proprietor said. “Depends on what mood I’m in when you ask.”
Reader, I bought them all.
And I still have them, somewhat the worse for wear after fifty-seven years that have taken me from one end of the country to the other, but most of them still in pretty nice shape. I didn’t buy them all at once, you understand. But very quickly I came to an understanding with the fierce-looking proprietor—Virginia Mushkin was her name—and her more gentle-looking husband David. They saw in me, correctly, a bright kid for whom those magazines were tremendously important—someone who was passionately in love with them, in fact—and they agreed to sell me the whole kaboodle at whatever pace I could pay for it. After all this time I have no recollection of how I raised the money—probably through advances on my allowance —or how long it took, but in the course of time I transferred those hundreds of unthinkably rare SF magazines, two paper-bag loads at a time, from 106a Court Street to my own apartment in another part of Brooklyn. The Mushkins and I became good friends; I was a sort of an adopted son to them, and they looked on with interest as I began to write my own first science fiction stories a year or so later. They are both long dead now, but they did live on to see me become a published author.
I read those magazines, one by one. I studied them. Sometimes I look at them even today, though not to read, because most of the stories they contain are crude, practically unreadable things. No matter. The mere sight of them gets my heart beating faster. For me they contained the whole history of science fiction in magazine form, and I cherished them for that, and I still do. I hope you who collect old SF magazines have Aladdin’s Cave stories like that, but I know you can’t have any to equal this one, the discovery of long runs of 1930 Astoundings and 1927 Amazings in the basement of a cluttered, dusty old junkshop, for sale at a pittance.
Oh—one little twist. Among the magazines I acquired there were two 1946 Astoundings that contained a serialized novel by the utterly forgotten writer Arthur Leo Zagat with an Aladdin angle of its own—“Slaves of the Lamp.”
