Comic Cuts — 7 July 2023

I have been having a whale of a time reacquainting myself with some terrible books and writing about them. Not that all of them are terrible... there are some gems amongst the chaff. I am, of course, talking about Badger Books.

Infamous as the home of the remarkable Reverand R. Lionel Fanthorpe, the Badger SF and Supernatural lines are some of the most collected of all British paperback originals. Lionel was the master of the weekend novel, using a battery of tape recorders to dictate his 45,000-worders in a matter of hours. The books are masterpieces of padding, poetry, go-nowhere conversations, and galloping endings when he realised he only had a couple of pages to wrap things up. There are around 167 volumes full of Lionel's marvelous Fanthorpisms.

All the more astonishing is that Lionel was not the company's most prolific writer by a long shot. John Glasby wrote over 100 volumes more than Lionel, his output clocking in at 269 novels and collections. And some of them are pretty good. As are novels by Ted Tubb, Vic J. Hanson and one or two other writers.

Yes, I'm finally getting around to revamping Badger Tracks, originally published through the high-end of self-publishing technology of the day (photocopying) back in 1997, and with a print-run of about 100 which I had to fold and staple myself to keep costs down. The "book" ran to over 100 pages and had the worst cover reproductions of any issue of PBO I put out. I have been promising a new edition for years — yes, people actually still ask me about it and whether I have any spare copies, which I don't as I printed enough to cover the subscriptions and no more.

Circumstances have meant I have a small window to put together a new edition. I'm revising all the text, switching out one article but adding two or three more, updating information on various writers, overhauling the checklist and index (quite a few new pen-names have been identified in the past twenty-five years) and printing the whole darn thing in colour so you can actually see the cover scans this time.

If you want to learn astonishing facts like the identity of the book that Spencers published four times under four different titles and bylines, and that the average Lionel Fanthorpe novel was written in early 1962, this will be the book for you!

I'm thinking of calling it Beyond the Void: The Remarkable History of Badger Books. The other title I toyed with was Assault From Infinity, but I think "assault" makes it sound too aggressive. This is Badger Books, not Honey Badger Books.

Of the other two books, things slowly move forward. A Laverda Journey now has captions and I have rejigged a couple of pages, but I still need to sort out the covers; and The Trials Of Hank Janson... well, that's nearly ready, too, although again I need to sort out the covers.

With all this activity, and a party (yes, we managed to get out of the house over the weekend to visit friends!), I have left the garden to its own devices. The recently sown grass seems to have taken root and is getting to a point where I might begin thinking about mowing the lawn. The last two days have seen a few persistent showers, so I don't have to make my mind today... but soon. As for the last area I seeded, that too is coming along nicely. I still need to pick out a load of stones, but rain and writing have got in the way.