Vintage Treasures: The Book of Skaith: The Adventures of Eric John Stark by Leigh Brackett
I joined the Science Fiction Book Club in the fall of 1975, when I was in my last year at St. Francis Junior High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Before I joined, I agonized over my introductory selection — three books for a just a dollar! — for days, reading and re-reading the tiny paragraphs in the brochure, and then waiting impatiently for my selections to arrive in the mail. My friend John MacMaster enrolled me and I’m pretty sure I’ll remember the contents of my enrollment package until the day I die: The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, The Hugo Winners, Volumes One and Two, edited by Isaac Asimov, and Before the Golden Age, edited by (can you guess?) Isaac Asimov.
John had introduced me to science fiction earlier that year, loaning me Clifford D. Simak’s Shakespeare’s Planet and Piers Anthony’s Ox when I was home sick from school. I devoured them both and wanted more. John explained how the club worked and it sounded terrific. “They sometimes have these big collections, a bunch of novels gathered into one book,” he said. “They’re the best.”
John was right. The year after I joined, in 1976, the featured selection for the month was The Book of Skaith: The Adventures of Eric John Stark, an omnibus of three novels by Leigh Brackett, under a new cover by Don Maitz. It was a marvelous introduction to one of SF’s great pulp writers, in an attractive and affordable package offered exclusively through the Science Fiction Book Club.
That’s one of the great things about the SFBC: its exclusive omnibus editions, highly collectible as they are, are generally still available at excellent prices. In February of this year, nearly 40 years after it was published, I bought a copy of The Book of Skaith in excellent condition on eBay for just $2.99.
