Believe it or not, I’m still looking through the last of the loot from the 2014 Windy City Pulp & Paper show here in Chicago from April.

Now, I’m pretty good at tracking down hard-to-find paperbacks and vintage curiosities — as long as I know about them. It’s a little harder to locate fabulous objects of desire if you’ve unaware of them. And that’s one of the great pleasures of Windy City: even a casual walk through the great Dealer’s Room is a marvelous exercise in serendipity. I found gorgeous art books, rare fanzines, beautiful pulps, and much more.

And I also stumbled across a copy of a delightful vintage paperback: The Bumper Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Aidan Chambers, a Pan paperback published in the UK in 1976. It’s an omnibus collection of The Tenth Ghost Book and The Eleventh Ghost Book, with an original cover price of £0.75. I paid $4 for a copy in very good condition. A quick Internet search reveals that there were at least three more, also from Pan: The Second Bumper Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Polly Parkin and James Hale (1978, cover here), the Third, and the Fourth, both edited by Hale. More treasures for me to track down!

So far, I’ve covered the following treasures found at Windy City this year:

Super Science Fiction pulps
The Vril Agenda by Derrick Ferguson and Josh Reynolds
Science Fiction of the 30′s edited by Damon Knight
Fantastic Novels, July 1948
Two Decades of Interzone
The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XIII edited by Karl Edward Wagner
Weird Tales #290
Stephen E. Fabian’s Ladies & Legends
The Bumper Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Aidan Chambers
Subterranean Magazine #2

See more of our recent Vintage Treasures articles here.