Monday, December 09, 2002 5:26 PM Joe Coluccio

Everyone who’s heard of Groff Conklin raise your tentacle!

One of the ways, as I chronologically fight with more and hardier resources, sagging skin, loss of hair, couch potato ness and a decided degree of angst in the face of all that I have not achieved, I move, somewhat mentally and mostly spiritually, against ever present entropy is via my own personal time machine. It is a simple mechanism really. No “way back machine”. No Delorian. Hardly new technology. Invented mid-fifteenth century, born royal folio size by hands and design of a German in Mainz, Rhineland, 180 volumes strong of which only 48 remainder pieces are extant, and none of those at the mall in B.Dalton Booksellers next to coffee table books about Hitler’s SS, Marionettes in History and Quilt Making. I refer to Moveable Type! The Gutenberg Bible, the referenced work. Over the centuries the presses have become more efficient, influential and pervasive. Put that in your e-reader Mr. Virtual!

I have been a collector of many peculiar books most of my life. Witness the wall to wall profusion in the basement where I presently sit. Filled as it is with “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.”

So, find me, if you look and will, frequently in thrift stores hidden behind rows of hand me down clothing and partially damaged appliances, looking at the eclectic tattered normally plebian selection of magazines, paper backs and hard backs. It is nothing less significant than the conquest of time that I seek. Or maybe just something good to read.

Now, take a trip with me if you will to 1533 Maple Avenue circa 1957, Rosedale. There I sit with old Fezziwig. It’s Fezziwig alive again!…ooops wrong story…on the front door stoop between the rhododendron plants and the damaged pink flamingos that survived a return trip with my family after a visit to Uncle Augie in Miami Beach. That blue plastic Arvin transistor radio in my lap with the 360 degree AM antenna has no FM band. Frequency Modulation has not debuted. Out of the speakers this wonderfully warm Saturday morning is Al Noble counting down the top 100 hits on KQV. Still 1410 AM. I am personally hoping that the Bobbettes and Mr. Lee make it to number one this week. ..three, four, five, look at him jive.

Next to me three or four garish, lurid science fiction pulp magazines, Astounding Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction and atop those an anthology of SF stories called Omnibus of Science Fiction. Compiled by none other that Groff Conklin. I was certain that Groff was his real name all these years until a small doubt crept into my thinking the other day and I looked it up, dub dub dub. O me of little faith, it is his real name, and what a moniker for the man who is as influential in the history of SF as many of the more luminous bodies. Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell Jr., Healy and McComas, Rod Serling even. (Admit it you don’t have a clue except for Serling.)

The doubt was occasioned by a first edition dust jacketless copy of the aforementioned Omnibus set behind the endless scratchy rows of LP 33 1/3 RPM Phonograph Records. I paid my seventy five cents, less I might add than the original cover price, and jumped (this is real time travel terminology here) back to young Joe. The hard head paid scant attention to my advice. Indeed, he paid no attention to me at all. Youth is wasted, I sighed, on the wrong people. Lest you think this is a fantasy. I am well aware that the Omnibus was published in 1952. I will only point out that the copy with me five years later was from the library. Verisimilitude restored!

I spent time (all the time in the world) in the introduction. Groff Conklin was an Aristotle of Science Fiction. He categorized with endless invention his compilations of stories: Worlds of Tomorrow, From Outer Space, The Best of Science Fiction, The Atom, Adventures in Dimension, The Super Science of Man, Far Traveling a smattering of the groupings cataloged. All of the great, optimistic, golden age science fiction writers are represented in the first five or six of Groff’s anthologies. (Andre Maurois? Jack London? I guess everyone tries Science Fiction.)

I slip back each evening, while I eat some dread natural food and sip some low level dose of alcohol. I laze the lazy day on the stoop, look out at the somnambulant traffic patterns on Maple Avenue (RD1, Verona, PA), wave to relations and friends, listen softly to Come Go With Me, Johnny B. Goode, Rocking Pneumonia and Boogie Woogie Flu, I wonder wonder who wrote the book of love, and read the wonders prepared for me by Groff.

You scoff? Don’t think it happens? Well then, look closely at that picture taken the following summer in front of the house. The Coca Cola Brown and White ’55 Buick in the drive to the left. Isn’t that me? In the picture? Well?