#lester del rey

[humanoidhistory]

Cosplay at the World Science Fiction Convention in St. Louis, 1969. Photos by Jay Kay Klein.

[atomic-chronoscaph]

art by David Mattingly (1982)

[thehauntedrocket]

Vintage Paperback - Assignment In Tomorrow by Frederik Pohl

Lancer (1972)

[gameraboy2]

Space Flight – The Coming Exploration of the Universe by Lester Del Rey New York: Golden Press, 1959 Illustrated by John Polgreen

[kekwcomics]

WORLDS OF FANTASY #1 (Galaxy Publishing, 1968)

Art: Jack Gaughan

[ebookporn]

The Man Who Invented Fantasy

All those wizards, ogres, and barely-clad elf queens in the bookstore? You have Lester del Rey to thank.

by Dan Sinykin

Lester del Rey wore 1950s-style horn-rimmed glasses, an unruly billy-goat beard, and his silver hair brushed back above a big forehead. He liberally dispensed cards that said: Lester del Rey, Expert. He sometimes said his full name was Ramón Felipe San Juan Mario Silvio Enrico Smith Heathcourt-Brace Sierra y Alvarez-del Rey y de los Verdes. He was in fact born Leonard Knapp, son of Wright Knapp, in 1915 in rural southeastern Minnesota, subject to the Minnesotan fever—Jay Gatz, Prince Rogers Nelson, Robert Zimmerman—for reinventing oneself. In 1977, del Rey, then in his 60s, turned his proclivity for fabulism to profit: He invented fantasy fiction as we know it.

I always thought fantasy had existed forever. Elves and wizards were old. Stories about them must have been, too, drawn from deep history, passed from generation to generation, just as my dad read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to me when I was 6. Part of the magic of these tales is the sense that they have always been this way; it’s thanks to that continuity with the past that we’re able to touch the enchanted premodern world, a place that hasn’t yet been rationalized by capitalism and science. With C.S. Lewis’s Lucy, I, too, walked through the wardrobe to Narnia. By middle school in the mid-1990s, I was ripping through the books of Piers Anthony’s Xanth series, with its basilisks and ogres, which were by then regularly landing on the New York Times bestseller list.

But it turns out that fantasy, as an enduring publishing genre, is hardly older than I am. All sorts of things had to go right—and wrong—to make it happen. 

READ MORE

[bookmaven]

BATTLE ON MERCURY by Eric van Lhin (aka Lester del Rey) (Philadelphia/Toronto: Winston, 1953) Cover art by Kenneth Fagg.

The story of Dick Rogers and his family and their odyssey through Mercury's bleak and blazing landscape. How he, an ancient robot and the Mercury veteran "Hotside Charlie" withstand Mercury's 800 degree temperatures, escape rivers of molten lead the fight the planet's horrifying silicone beasts

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Lester Del Rey - The best Of - Ballantine - 1978 (cover art by Gary Viskupic)

[spaceintruderdetector]

https://archive.org/details/Fantastic_Science-Fiction_Art_1926-1954/mode/2up

[archivist-dragonfly]

Book 318

Fantastic Science-Fiction Art: 1926-1954

Lester Del Rey, ed.

Ballantine Books 1975

Honestly, I don’t know why I don’t have more books like this one. I love vintage science fiction art, and this is an excellent collection. Edited by the great Lester Del Rey, this book collects cover art from the heyday of the pulps. From publications like Amazing Stories, Science Wonder Stories, Wonder Stories Quarterly, Astounding Stories, Startling Stories and others, this book is filled with fantastic art from Frank R. Paul, Leo Morey, Robert Fuqua, Alex Schomburg, Frank Kelly Freas and many more.

[misforgotten2]

Cover by Robert Gibson Jones  --  1950

[theladyfromplanetx]

He realized now that there was another lack in all the languages he knew. There was no word to describe any relationship between different forms of life that gave dignity to both. A pet was not the equal of its keeper. A symbiote was something that existed in a physical relation with another, but not with any understanding. And men had always meant humans when they referred to friends. He couldn't honestly call the creatures in the globe friends, since they would require more knowledge and understanding than they had.

- Outpost of Jupiter (1963)

Lester Del Rey

[thehauntedrocket]

Vintage Paperback - Best Science Fiction Of The Year by Lester Del Rey

Ace (1973)

[baroque-hashem]

The Early Del Rey, Volume 2 (1976) by Lester Del Rey

[kekwcomics]

ATTACK FROM ATLANTIS (The John C. Winston Company, 1953)