Until recently I don’t think I’d heard of Nelson Bond. Last month I bid on a few Arkham House books. As I have a hard limit, I was outbid on around 20 or 30 of them, but, by some strange twist of fate I managed to secure two or three books at reasonable prices. One of the books that I acquired was Bond’s Nightmares and Daydreams, published in 1968 for the low price of $5 (though by 1968 standards, that may have seemed like a pretty penny), collecting within its pages 14 short stories and one poem. Apparently Bond was a major writer of fantastic tales from the late 1930s through the 1950s. He then took a long break before writing fiction once more.
Fast forward a few weeks, and I’m in Bookmans, a used bookstore (and exchange of all sorts of things, from ceramic figurines to guitars) in Phoenix, Arizona. The store is vast, with shelves of books in various genres, all used, but few that I wanted. By chance, question about collectible fiction resulted in a store clerk directing me to an area near the check-out counters. There, a handful of sad looking “collectible books” leaned against each other in a tiny glass bookshelf. And I mean tiny. But, tucked in between what appeared to be some book club editions (but probably weren’t), stood another Nelson Bond book: The Thirty-first of February. This Gnome Press edition was published in 1949, and for a book going on 76 years, it wasn’t in bad shape, and for $20 it seemed a steal.
