Hubbard authority Widder (The Fiction of L. Ron Hubbard) pays loving tribute to the pulp master (and founder of Scientology) in a wonderfully designed book with full-color illustrations on nearly every page, many depicting pulp magazine covers and related interior drawings. Surveying the entire range of Hubbard's remarkable writing career, it features a lavish array of artwork from the western, adventure, action, SF and fantasy magazines of the pulp era as well as from later novels, including that mind-blowing colossus, Battlefield Earth. Starting in 1934, Hubbard (1911–1986) published hundreds of stories that would appear in such classic pulp magazines as Astounding
and Unknown. Over the decades he was fortunate to have such sterling illustrators as Edd Cartier (his most intuitive collaborator), Hubert Rogers, Hannes Bok, Frank Frazetta and Gerry Grace. A chapter devoted to Hubbard's Writers and Illustrators of the Future programs, a biographical chronology and a bibliography round out this beautiful volume, a testament to a half-century of popular literary endeavor. (Sept.)
Forecast:Pulp magazines with Hubbard material command extra high prices in the collector's market. Not just Hubbard fans, though, but anyone fond of pulp art, celebrated in a current exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, will want to have this gorgeous book.
