Self-Destructing H.G. Wells Paperbacks from the 1960s

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

August 25, 2013 

Now that science fiction has achieved respectability, showing up regularly on the New York Times Best Seller List and filling half the screens at the megaplex, we forget that in the early days, all we fanboys had was H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Back then, in the 1890s, there was no category of fiction called “science fiction” yet. The works of Wells, Verne, and a smattering of others like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger stories, came to be known as “scientific romances.” The early novels of H.G. Wells (1866-1946) are without debate the most readable, timeless, and literate of all the science fiction that was published before the advent of science fiction specialty magazines in the 1920s. 

I came to these novels mostly via the old Airmont Classics paperbacks of the 1960s. In the mid-1960s, my mother was enamored of the idea of a required pre-college reading list.  She was that classic mid-20th-Century housewife who had gotten married and had babies right out of high school, lived to be a domestic engineer, self-effacing, supporting her husband and two boys in all their endeavors. She didn’t read much in those days, but she ardently believed in the value of reading. She regretted not being able to go to college herself, but she instilled in her children the notion that going to college was expected to be in their future, and that there were a lot of important books to read before they got there(later, in the 1980’s, Mom did start reading books, got divorced, went back to college, and lived an entire second life as a high school librarian and English teacher.) So, when Airmont Publishing Company offered cheap paperbacks through the mail of the 100 greatest classic novels, my mother subscribed to the series, and I lived the rest of my childhood in a home containing the shelves of books I was supposed to read before college. 

I never got through all the books, but I did have an uncanny sense for sniffing out the science fiction, and it turned out that Airmont had included plenty of that. The only thing was, the books were so cheaply made—with brittle glue, yellowing paper, and cheesy cover illustrations-—they tended to self-destruct upon first reading. You could only read an Airmont Classic once and then consign it to the trash, because all you were left with was a bunch of loose pages. I remember reading Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island and holding it together with a rubber band between reading sessions. 

I’m not sure what happened to Airmont, but they ceased to exist sometime back in the 1960s. All the books have prefaces copyrighted about 1964-1965. Our classics series was supposed to be a subscription with so many books arriving per month. But, before long, we just got a large box containing about 75 of the books all at once. I suspect Airmont went out of business and honored their outstanding subscriptions by simply cleaning out their warehouse. I still remember the day that big box of books arrived.  I was probably 7 or 8 years old, and I already loved reading. That day was like Christmas. I spent countless hours putting the books in alphabetical order, studying the cover blurbs and prefaces, and every now and then, delving into the books, often years before I could really comprehend the contents. I did a 6th grade book report on Dostoyevsky. I read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness years before I would ever accumulate the life experiences that could even halfway allow it to mean something to me. 

The Airmont Classics look today like a reading list from years gone by. I think they might have been created from the same reading list that formed the basis for the old Classics Illustrated comics. The Airmont Classics come from an era that still regarded Longfellow as an important poet (children used to memorize Evangeline), when kids still read Ivanhoe in junior high school, when Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper were the main purveyors of Americana in literature. Hardly anybody reads Longfellow, Sir Walter Scott, Irving, or Cooper anymore.  Because I am a curator of a collection of antique popular literature, I have a certain enthusiasm for those old classics.  However, the old reading list also comes from an era when the only history of the world was the history of Europe and North America. An era when Columbus was still a hero and it wasn’t yet politically incorrect to celebrate his holiday. An era when the only African-American accomplishment taught to schoolchildren was that George Washington Carver did a lot of things with peanuts. It was an era when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was considered subversively radical rather than almost Biblical.  I enjoy the quaint nostalgia of the old curriculum, but at the same time I try to be firmly rooted in what I believe to be our more enlightened modern times. 

Over the years, our Airmont collection diminished. The books were either read (in which case, they self-destructed), or they were lost. During one of Mom’s moves, several of them flew out the back of the pick-up truck onto the highway, never to be recovered. She finally gave me the pick of what was left, when she was culling discards from her library. I remembered the H.G. Wells novels fondly from my childhood, so I decided to feature them here on the blog. You’ll notice that Wells’ first novel, The Time Machine (1895) is missing from this blog page, even though Airmont had an edition of it.  That’s because I read it to the point of self-destruction. I’ve seen it in used bookstores since. I should probably replace it. 

Wells wrote “scientific romances” throughout his career, but the majority of the ones we remember are his earliest novels, starting with The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Popular wisdom often credits Wells with being the originator of many of the great science fiction ideas, such as time travel or alien invasions. I agree that Wells’ science fiction output is a fertile vein that was mined by many later writers.  But what interests me more these days is how Wells’ scientific romances fit in with themes that were already popular at the time he was writing. The Invisible Man (1897) is fundamentally a meditation on the same Victorian concepts of good vs. evil that interested Robert Louis Stevenson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Much of the pre-science fiction of Wells’ day concerns future war predictions in the run-up to the destruction of the European monarchies and the advent of World War I; that is more or less the sub-text of The War of the Worlds (1898), although Wells’ variation on the topic is brilliant and original. Wells expanded on his concept of “total war” in other books, notably The War in the Air (1908).  Another major concern of H.G. Wells, and many of the pre-science fiction writers of his era, was socio-economic extrapolation, often under the guise of utopian or dystopian fiction. Along these lines, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward had already been a big bestseller starting in 1888, with the book starting a political movement that lasted through the 1890’s. Wells returned again and again in his novels to utopian/dystopian scenarios. Such scenarios show up in The Time Machine, The First Men in the Moon (1901), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), The Food of the Gods (1904), A Modern Utopia (1905), Men Like Gods (1923), and other works. In fact, as his career went on, the science fiction more or less disappeared from Wells’ work and was replaced by thinly plotted stories that are mostly platforms for sociological discussion. Most of that was lost on me as a 10-year old devouring these books.  Having read them so young, it is fascinating to rediscover them 40 years later.