Here it is Monday night, July 26. PulpFest is just a few days away, and like many of you, sadly, I won't be attending this year.

Pulp festivities kickoff at 9 p.m. Thursday, July 29, and continue until around 10 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 2.

It looks to be a terrific pulp gathering. The PulpFest committee — Jack Cullers, Barry Traylor, Mike Chomko and Ed Hulse — has put together a calendar packed with events I'd love to attend. Sigh.

It's been a while since I have written anything for Yellowed Perils. I've spent most of my "pulp time" writing an article for, then designing, The Pulpster (the annual zine edited by Tony Davis and published for the summer's pulp convention).

I'm pretty excited about this year's Pulpster. Tony has put together a great selection of articles: PulpFest Guest of Honor William F. Nolan writes about Sam Spade, Destry and Dr. Kildare; Don Hutchison, on pulpster David Goodis; Frederick Painton, on Arthur Burks' plot trick (reprinted from a vintage Writer's Digest); John Locke, on pulpster Paul Ernst; Nick Carr, who answers 10 pulp questions he's been asked; Wayne Leighton (aka Rex Layton), on L. Ron Hubbard; David L. Fox, on Max Brand's first year writing for Western Story Magazine; Bruce Stirling, on Carroll John Daly's "Three Gun Terry"; and my article, on a forgotten 1978 Doc Savage TV movie script.

I have to give kudos to Francesco Francavilla for drawing a wonderful Doc Savage illustration to accompany my article. You can take a sneak peak of the illustration on his Pulp Sunday blog. (While you're there, check out all of his other terrific illustrations.)

This year's Pulpster sports its first color cover (that's it above left) and runs 44 pages. If you've registered for PulpFest (to attend or as a supporting member), you'll receive a copy. If not, check out the PulpFest website after PulpFest for details on purchasing one.

If you, like me, can't make it to PulpFest, consider some of the other pulp gatherings. There may be one near you. I'll be attending the Arizona Doc Con in November. (More details to come regarding that, so stay tuned.)

There's a listing of Pulp.Events on the TPN home page. Hope you can check out one of the gatherings. Getting together with fellow pulp fans is a great experience.

— William

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Brian Earl Brown used to have on his Web site a page devoted to "Earle Bergey and the Wonderful Brass Bra," with several examples of science-fiction pulp covers by Bergey.

Bergey specialized in painting gorgeous space girls (barely) clad in boots, briefs and, as Brian described them, brass brassieres — apparently the standard outfit for spacefaring females in the '40s and '50s.

The first pulp cover in his Bergey gallery was the September 1948 number of Startling Stories, which featured "What Mad Universe" by Fredric Brown. (Click the image at left to see a larger version of Bergey's cover.)

Well into that story, Fredric Brown addresses the issue of the "brass bra" outfit:

Betty said, "Come in, K-Keith Winton."

He didn't even notice at first that she'd called him by his right name. She still wore the costume she'd worn at her desk that morning at the Borden offices. Yes, there were green trunks to go with the green bra. They were very brief trunks, very well shaped. Green leather boots came halfway up shapely calves. Between the boots and the trunks, the bare golden flesh of dimpled knees and rounded thighs.

She stepped back and, scarcely daring to breathe, Keith went into the room. He closed the door behind him and stood leaning against it, staring at Betty, not quite believing.

The room was dim, the shades already pulled down. The light came from a pair of candles in a candelabrum on the table behind Betty. Her face was shadowed, but the soft light behind her made a golden aura of her blond hair and silhouetted her slim, beautiful body. An artist could not have posed her better.

Then about a page later, Fredric Brown picks up the topic again with Keith speaking to Betty:

"I can't seem to believe in anything here, really, except — No, I don't even believe in you — in that costume. What is it? Do you wear it all the time?"

"Of course."

"Why? I mean, other women here —"

She looked at him in bewilderment. "Not all of them, of course. Only a very few in fact. Only the space girls."

"Space girls?"

"Of course. Girls who work, or have worked, on spaceships. Or ones who are fiancees of space men. Being Dopelle's fiancee would entitle me to wear it, even if I hadn't done exploring in space, on leaves of absence from Borden."

"But why?' He floundered. "I mean, is it so hot in a spaceship that such an — an abbreviated costume is necessary? Or what?"

"I don't know what you mean. Of course it isn't hot in spaceships. Mostly we wear heated plastic coveralls."

"Transparent plastic?"

"Naturally. Mr. Winton, what are you getting at?"

He ran a hand through his hair. "I wish I knew. The costumes. Transparent plastic — Like the covers on Surprising Stories."

"Why, of course. Why would cover pictures like that be put on Surprising Stories unless we really wore such costumes?"

He tried to think of an answer to that; there wasn't any.

I just finished reading "What Mad Universe" and highly recommend it for pulp fans. Not only is it a fun — and sometimes funny — read, the main character is an editor at a pulp magazine company, so you get a bit of an inside look at the pulp business in the 1940s.

— William

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Walker Martin on the PulpMags group at Yahoo posted a notice that pulp artist Ernest Chiriacka died Tuesday, April 27, 2010. “Darcy,” as Chiriacka was known, was 96.

Several tributes, with his artwork, are available:

• Newsday: A short obituary for Chiriacka appears on the Newsday Web site.

• Pulp Artists: David Saunders has a short item about Chiriacka on his Web site. On the Chiriacka page inside the site are a number of his pulp covers.

• Killer Covers: This weekly blog talks about Chiriacka and features a number of his paperback covers.

• Today’s Inspiration: Leif Peng has posted several of Chiriacka’s later work on his blog.

Sadly, with the passing of Chiriacka and Philip Klass, we've lost this year both Guests of Honor from PulpCon 35.

— William

Updated: Added Newsday obituary link.

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I've been in the market for an e-reader for a while. My wife bought one of the original Amazon Kindles several years ago and loves it. I had my eye on the Plastic Logic Que reader (also an E-Ink type of device) after news of it was released over a year ago.

The Que debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show back in January and looked great. It will have a black-and-white E-Ink screen (like the Kindle), measuring 10.7-inches (diagonal), and weigh just over a pound. It is expected to support .pdf, .epub, .txt and a variety of graphics files. Unfortunately, the Que's release was delayed until late summer.

It will come in two versions: a 4-gigabyte, Wi-Fi edition for $650; and a 8-gigabyte, Wi-Fi/3G edition for $800.

Meanwhile, Apple announced the iPad shortly after CES.

The iPad features a slightly smaller 9.7-inch (diagonal) screen, but it's a higher-resolution LED color screen. And the unit weighs about a pound-and-a-half.

The iPad has the Que beat on price and capacity. The iPads run $500-$600-$700 for 16-gigabyte, 32-GB and 64-GB Wi-Fi versions; $630-$730-$830 for the Wi-Fi/3G versions.

The real selling point for the iPad is that it is more than just an e-reader: it's a computer, complete with e-mail, Web browsing and apps.

I was curious about the iPad, so I ventured down to the store on release day, April 3. After watching others testing out iPads and spending a bit of time using one myself, I took the plunge.

Okay, enough with the tech rundown. The real question is: How well does it work as an e-reader?

After almost two weeks of using it most every day, I have to say it works great. The screen is sharp, bright and easy on the eyes. I've spent time reading .epub, .pdf and .cbr files. The .epub and .pdf files are crisp and easy to ready. The .cbr/.cbz files are made up of scanned pulp pages (usually .jpg files), so their readability depends on the quality of the scan and the quality of the pulp magazine or microfiche/microfilm scanned.

I've tried out three apps for reading digital pulp stories:

• iBooks (the free e-reader software from Apple) displays .epub files. The beta .epub files from Project Gutenberg transfer fine, but the formatting is not always right (and the proofreading isn't always great). I've tinkered around with creating a few .epub files on my own, and they work great. You get all of the benefits of the e-reader (bookmarks, resizable type, etc.) with the .epub files.

• ComicZeal4 is really geared for comic books formatted as .cbr or .cbz, but works well with the similarly formatted pulps. You drag a .cbr file over to the ComicZeal Sync application (I'm using it on my Mac laptop), which re-compresses the file to a .cbi file. Then you can wirelessly sync it to the iPad. It looks as sharp as the .cbr files do on the laptop, but I find it much easier to read them on the iPad. You can zoom in as needed.

• GoodReader handles .pdf files. I've uploaded a couple of large (18-megabyte) .pdfs using it — it also lets you transfer the files wirelessly from a computer to the iPad. Other than being a bit slow the initial time you open one of the files, it does a fantastic job of displaying the PDFs.

The battery life has been amazing. I've recharged it three times in the past week-and-a-half, despite using it daily, mostly for checking e-mail, surfing the Web and reading. (The iPad's a much better alternative to my laptop for using in the living room.)

My only complaint is the weight. A pound-and-a-half doesn't sound like much, but after reading for a bit, it feels better to rest it on something.

I've put together a brief video showing the three e-reader apps in action on the iPad. (Plus there's a funky moire pattern in the video, but it's not there on the actual iPad screen. Also, the caption should be iBooks, rather than iBook.)



Anyone else reading pulps on an e-reader?

— William

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If my kids read that headline, first thing they would ask would be: "What's a Sears, Roebuck catalog?" But that's another story.

Back in the late 1990s when we were living in the Tampa Bay area, I first visited pulp dealer David Alexander's Tampa warehouse. It was the largest single collection of pulps I'd ever seen. The warehouse housed not only the pulps he had for sale, but also books, movie memorabilia, etc.

Beside the rows of shelved pulps, what really caught my attention were the monsters high on a shelf to the right.

The pulps I was familiar with were of the standard half-inch thick, around 128-page variety. What were these behemoths?

Turns out they were quarterly editions of science fiction pulps.

Can you imagine plunking down your 50 cents and hauling home a nearly 2-inch-thick collection of outlandish entertainment? That would last a kid days.

Years later I broke down and bought one of the monsters — the Winter 1950 number of Amazing Stories Quarterly — and discovered the secret. It wasn't some fantastically large single issue; it was actually three unsold monthly issues — June, July and August 1950 — glued together to form a single magazine. The only thing missing were the front and back covers of the individual magazines.

For a 50-cent cover price you got 75-cents worth of pulp science fiction. Would you have waited for the quarterly to save a quarter?

— William

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