[Science Fiction]. [Juvenalia]

[Unique Manuscript Journal of UFO Conspiracies, Wild Space Program Conjecture, and Science Fiction]

[Pennsylvania? 1957]. [76]pp. Quarto. Quarter cloth and paper wrappers. Spine perishing, corners chipped. Moderate wear, short edge tears to wraps. Toning and dust soiling, scattered staining internally. Accomplished in a competent, legible script. Good. Item #6266

A fabulous handmade, manuscript journal, densely filled with Cold War–era space-race “clippings” copied out by hand -- headlines, summaries, and quoted fragments -- interleaved with enthusiastic UFO speculation, “maverick” moon observations, and two recurring strands of pulp-style fiction. Throughout, the anonymous compiler moves fluidly between news-as-evidence, homegrown theory, and imaginative narrative, creating a self-contained time capsule of mid-century American space anxiety and wonder. The “research” pages cite (and argue with) contemporary coverage from Associated Press, UPI, Sky & Telescope, and the New York Times, including material on Sputnik II and the dog-o-naut Laika (“Muttnik”), alleged objects in the sky over Japan, and popular claims about radio signals, moon lights, and various conspiracies concerning “evidence” the public wasn’t being told. One page is headed “BOYERTOWN’S FLASH FLOOD in SEPT. 1956” with additional local notations, giving the notebook a lived-in, diaristic anchor amid the cosmic preoccupations.

Interspersed with the text are lively pencil sketches -- robots. spacecraft, a long-legged “machine,” a bus labeled “1935 IMPORTED BLIMP-TYPE BUS,” cartoon figures, and a full-page caricature labeled “Zsa-Zsa.” The compiler also keeps lists of “Space & Satellite Experts” with phone numbers, “space center questions,” rhyming-word lists, and other working notes that make the book feel like an active, personal dossier rather than a passive scrapbook. A few loose manuscript notes are laid in.

In addition, two fictional narratives appear in serialized bursts -- “The Fiendish Machine,” a space-opera episode featuring Joyce of Earth (“graceful Queen of astral fields”) locked in combat with an otherworldly robot-machine, and a separate tale of "Valora," who encounters danger in the wild, including a tense sequence involving a baboon, which was evidently inspired by a period news item about a “white girl attacked by a vicious baboon." A singular artifact of mid-century amateur ufology and space-race obsessiveness -- part scrapbook, part argument, part pulp serial -- rich with period texture and wonderful drawings.

Price: $2,000.00