Acquisitions: The Secret of the Martian Moons

This is completely a case of buying a book for the sake of the awesome cover. Just look at it: a man in a space-suit is unloading boxes from a tiny, tiny needle-shaped rocket, only seconds away from being beaned in the head by a Martian ninja. Secret of the Martian Moons (sometimes with a prepended "the"), by Donald A Wollheim, claims that by the year 2120 Earth will have a colony on Mars, and the main character, Nelson Parr, was born and raised on the red planet. On his way back after schooling on Earth, the humans are ordered not to return to Mars, but he and his compartriots land on Mars' moons and check out the problem with telescopes. Bring on the mallet-wielding Martians who don't like being watched! The cover art is credited to Alex Schomburg, a golden-age comic book illustrator and prolific sci-fi cover artist. The book itself seems to revert back to the old premise of Mars-centric literature: Martians had been around long before humans, advanced well beyond mankind, but their dying planet defeated them — leaving only the wet canal regions a haven for what little life remained. While I might not be able to get into the book itself, I can at least enjoy Schomburg's excellent cover art.

Acquisitions: Letters from Mamma

That guy there on the right is a direct line to Cougar Town: although he performed as the character Charley Weaver, musician and entertainer Cliff Arquette begat Lewis Arquette, father of David Arquette, who is married to TV and film star Courtney Cox-Arquette. Four degrees of separation from 1950s pun-laden humor to shows based on 21st century pop-culture slang terms, eh?

Charley Weaver's Letters from Mamma is a collection of jokes by Arquette, from his Tonight Show skits. They're unanimously groaners, both now and back then, but Jack Paar sure thought he was funny, and Weaver's audiences sure thought so, too. Arquette appeared as Weaver on the Tonight Show, and later on the Jack Paar Show, and towards the end of his life he was a regular on Hollywood Squares. This 1959 book was his first of two, and the one directly related to his Letter segments. I don't know that I'm going to read it — just flipping through, the jokes verge on terrible — so I'm guessing that they were better seen than read, and off to YouTube I go!