TREASURE

Space Invaders Aliens, robots, spaceships: Pulp sci-fi goes to Harvard

he world’s first magazine a youngster, Ordway began in devoted to science fiction, earnest to collect pulp-magazine Amazing Stories, was born in science fiction. As a grownup col- 1926, a year before Frederick I. lector, he shifted from fiction to TOrdway III ’49. The Ordway family maid astronomy and from magazines to one day left a copy of Amazing Stories on a rare books. “I moved beyond dining room chair when Ordway was a them,” he told Harvard College sprat; he spotted it, devoured it, and Library sta≠er Jennifer Tomase, straightaway was hooked. He joined the “but I always loved the pulps.” American Rocket Society at age 11 and He gave his collection of about went on to become an actual rocket sci- 900 sci-fi pulps to the library in entist, working for Wernher von Braun at 2002. They are a rich cache of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and popular culture that will be of later at NASA. He has written, coau- unpredictable but undoubted thored, or edited more than 30 popular value to researchers, and they books about rocketry and space travel. As pose bracing preservation problems. They the Ordway pulps have undergone the so- are called “pulps” because called Bookkeeper mass deacidification their inside pages are rough, process. Technicians dip small batches of wood-pulp paper, unlike the decaying pulp sci-fi into a bath of magne- “glossies” or the “slicks,” and sium oxide, which is alkaline. The potion ordinarily they are not long circulates for two hours and coats the for this world. paper evenly. It is waterless, and so the As acid breaks down the paper fibers don’t swell. After its bath, molecular structure of paper, the paper is nicely alkaline, with a pH be- it darkens and weakens. tween 8.0 and 9.5 (7.0 is neutral). In the Cheap wood-pulp paper is following weeks, the magnesium oxide very acid to begin with, and particles on the paper combine with age makes it even more so. moisture from the air to form an alkaline Malloy-Rabinowitz pre- magnesium-hydroxide bu≠er that will servation librarian Jan Mer- absorb and neutralize acids in the paper rill-Oldham explains that for the remainder of the pulps’ days. Tests indicate that the treatment extends paper life by three to five times, a stay of execu- tion for Captain Future.

The covers of the April 1926 first issue of Amazing Stories and of Future Fiction, November 1940, were by pulp artist Frank R. Paul, the major force in defining what sci-fi art should look like. Howard V. Brown did the covers of Startling Stories, May 1939, and Thrilling Wonder Stories, January 1940. Super Science Stories, May 1940, was by Gabriel Mayorga. The cover for the winter 1940 Captain Future was by [George?] Rozen. HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY