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Decided to read something a little lighter, and I'm a big fan of old pre-war pulps.

This one is a villain pulp, built around a scheming evil mastermind instead of a pulp hero. There were a bunch of these back then, all inspired by Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories. Few of these were particularly successful, usually only lasting a few issues.

I'm quite fond of them, and this one looks particularly over the top (in a good way).

A story of mind control from an old SF legend. In a near-future post-apocalyptic dystopia, a man discovers the cause of an unending series of possessions.

For an early 60s sci-fi, it was surprisingly dark and nihilistic. The ending was quite bleak.

It's in the public domain, so I read the free, nicely formatted version from standardebooks.org

This is a curious volume I picked up in a used bookstore. It's a 1986 collection of non-fiction articles about New England collected from periodicals from the 1800s to the early twentieth century.

There's no introduction, preface, or index. For many of the articles, the source is not identified, though some of them came from Scribner's Monthly, a long defunct magazine.

Still only part way through, but it's a mixed bag - some fascinating bits of lore, some astonishingly dull articles about the history of various New England cities.

I wonder who the intended market of this was. It feels like a book that would be bought at a museum gift shop, placed on a shelf and never opened even once.