One thing I’ve been thinking about of late has been how I got into reading Doc Savage and my experiences finding and reading the stories. It was reading Doc that lead me to other pulp heroes. Before that, I was mainly a reader of science fiction.
As best I can recall, I first came across one of the Bantam paperback reprints of Doc in a hospital waiting room while in middle school. It was “King Maker.” The cover, despite not being a James Bama cover, grabbed me. The logo was intriguing; the back cover info as well. And there has always been something about the Doc titles that got me: Land of Always-Night, He Could Stop the World, etc.
From then on, I worked to find and read other Docs. I hit used bookstores. New copies I got from the few sources of books in my hometown (this was before the advent of giant bookstores like Borders or Barnes & Noble, and way before Amazon). One was the local K-Mart (back in the days when K-Mart actually carried a lot of books).
Another source was the only bookstore in town at the time: Little Professor Books. We soon got a used bookstore, which I haunted as well. (And how I soon found and started reading The Avenger and then on to others).
I got the new Docs as they came out. At this point, it was the tail-end of the single novels. I recall getting Magic Island at the local K-Mart. The Bob Larkin cover grabbed me, his first. I always felt that Bob’s earlier Doc covers were the best and most impactful. I recalled wondering if the cover was a photo or not.
At some point, I got a copy of Philip José Farmer‘s Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (the first paperback edition from Bantam). This made me briefly rearrange my Doc collection from original publication order to Farmer’s order — until I realized that was silly, and changed it back. And that cover was my first, if not clear, exposure to the pulp Doc.
I kept buying the Docs as they came out: the doubles and then the omnibus editions. Though for some reason I didn’t read the stories in them, I think because I preferred the early pre-WWII adventure stories. When Will Murray came out with new ones, I got those and read them. I’d figure I’d go back to the ones I skipped, but haven’t yet.
So at this point I had a complete set. It took me awhile. My last one was finding He Could Stop the World at the World SF Convention in 1992 in Orlando.
As mentioned, from Doc, I got into other pulp heroes: The Avenger, The Shadow, and others. All paperback reprints of them. As access to original pulp heroes became harder (I never got into collecting the original pulps, couldn’t afford that), plus I had read most of what was available, I got into techno-thrillers and then New Pulp.
When Anthony Tollin started the Doc reprints, at first I didn’t get them, as I had the stories. But when I found out about the additional articles and the restored text, I started to get them. I haven’t started re-reading any yet (though I do read the articles). Hopefully some day I’ll have the time to go back.
