Could you help? (Unknown magazine issues 1939-40)

[neil&casperp]

Hello - new to this forum so please delete if this is inappropriate or in the wrong place.

My son is a big collector of the Beano & Dandy and recently won an auction which had some of the annuals he wanted but also some stuff which is interesting and ScFi related.

There were 3 large bound copies of Unknown (worlds) magazine dating back from 1939 -1940.
Whats really strange is that they are massive. Not normal magazines and somewhat professionally bound like a proper retail annual and featuring stories from everyones favourate Scientologist L Ron Hubbard.

I have attached a picture below but can send more if anyone would know someone who knows about this.

Just wondered if they are worth anything or of interest to any collectors.


Many thanks for your help

 

[Dave]

Firstly, I'm certainly not an expert but as an amateur historian I would hate you to just dispose of them. I'm also going to move this to our Book Search forum as I think it will garner more replies there.

Unknown magazine (also known as Unknown Worlds after 1943) was edited by John W Campbell and ran from 1939 to 1943 (until 1949 as Unknown Worlds). It was published in the USA by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., and in the UK by Atlas Publishing and Distribution Co. Ltd. It was created as a fantasy magazine to rival Weird Tales and as a partner magazine to his Astounding Science Fiction magazine. It was published monthly from March to December in 1939, in every month during 1940, and then bi-monthly thereafter.

What you are holding is not a book as such, but probably a collection of inexpensive pulp fiction magazines that have been bound privately, rather than being published like that. Is it complete for 1939 and 1940? If so, it would contain 22 magazines. From the thickness, it looks more like the first 10 magazines from 1939. If you have another 2 of them, then maybe it is the complete years 1939-1940..

The November 1939 issue is shown here: Publication: Unknown [UK], November 1939
and it serialised the Sons of the Bear-God by John Prester, with story artwork by Frank Kramer. Several of the covers that year has cover artwork by Graves Gladney.

I'm certain that collectors would be interested in these. The price would depend on the condition of the magazines, on specifically which issues you have, and whether they have been damaged by binding them.

For some idea of the value, I would have suggested looking at AbeBooks | Shop for Books, Art & Collectibles but I can't find anything quite like that there. You would probably need to attend some specialist book fair, or else put them back into auction.

We also have some resources you might wish to use yourself here: Book Search Resources

Just to add that you cannot offer them for sale here. In order to sell them to members here you would need to first become a Supporter and you could then sell them to other Supporters by an unregulated private sale only. We don't allow sales notices by companies, or sales posts by non-Supporters, or any posts about sales on the main forum.

 

[Ravensquawk]

AbeBooks mentioned above has always been a good resource. (For me buying, not selling.)

"Stump the bookseller" on Loganberry Books might be worth the four dollars you pay them to look up answers.

Can't sell it there that i know of, but I paid them once in a similar attempt to find out if I really had a rare valuable original of bawdy "The Merry Muses" by Robert Burns. (Spoiler: Nope, not even if it says "1872" on the first page.)

Most are title searches like this one, but it's a start.

Loganberry and Powell's pay for used books. (I have a foreboding that old SF magazines and collections may not be what they buy, though. We both might have to be local heroes to our library. But even they sell their old books, probably including donations.)

There's Strand Books.
There are articles on How and where to sell your used books.
There's the Book Scouter, a one-stop to enter books.
Worldcat lets you know where copies of a book are. If there are few, or if libraries won't lend the copy to interlibrary loans and instead never allow "The Precious" outside their own doors, then you have a hint that it is hard to find.