Girasol Collectables is a small Canadian press that’s producing high-quality facimilies of classic pulp magazines (I bought a copy of this Spicy Adventure Stories mag yesterday for the cover, without realizing that one of the stories was written by Robert Howard under his Sam Walser pseudonym) at the rate of one a month. At US$25-35 per issue, it’s a little pricey to consider as a subscription item, but as a one-off, these things are fantastic. I love the old pulps, but when I buy them, I’m reluctant to give them a home beside the toilet, where they’d be great reading material, what with all their humorous quack-remedy ads, overblown short stories, and general bite-siized irony. But the old pulps feel like a piece of history, something you down own so much as take custody over — they’re so fragile and poorly wrought that they bring out the maternal/archival instinct in all but the most hardened junk-hater.
But these replicas — in addition to being better-manufactured than any of the original pulps! — are cheap(ish) and replaceable, and a perfect tank-top reader. I kept hauling out my copy yesterday and showing it around, and the universal reaction among the WorldCon-goers was a bittersweet sigh of regret for the passing of the golden age of dreadful fic and exploitative covers and quack advertisements.