"Mike Resnick - Roots and a Few Vines (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

Saturday morning. At which time we found out that the convention
was already half over.
(Things were different then. There were no times in the
convention listings. In fact, there were no convention listings.
Not in _Analog_, not anywhere. If you knew that worldcons even
existed, you were already halfway to being a trufan.)
Caz (right: he wasn't a Miss at all) met us and showed us
around. Like myself, he was dressed in a suit and tie; it was a
few more worldcons before men wore shirts without jackets or ties,
even during the afternoons, and every woman -- they formed, at
most, 10% of the attendees, and over half were writers' wives --
wore a skirt. If you saw someone with a beard -- a relatively rare
occurrence -- you knew he was either a pro writer or Bruce Pelz.
When we got to the huckster room -- 20-plus dealers (and
selling only books, magazines, and fanzines; none of the junk that
dominates the tables today), I thought I had died and gone to
heaven. The art show had work by Finlay and Freas and Emsh and
even Margaret Brundage; only J. Allen St. John was missing from
among the handful of artists whose work I knew and admired.
They had an auction. It even had a little booklet telling you
what items would be auctioned when, so you knew which session to
attend to get what you wanted. Stan Vinson, a famous Burroughs
collector who had been corresponding with me for a year, bought a
Frazetta cover painting for $70. Friends told him he was crazy;
paintings were supposed to appreciate, and no one would ever pay
that much for a Frazetta again. I bought a Finlay sketch for
$2.00, and an autographed Sturgeon manuscript for $3.50.
In the afternoon we decide to go to the panels. I do not know
from panels; like any neo, I take along a pencil and a notebook.
The panels are not what we have these days, or at least they did
not seem so to my untrained and wondrous eyes and ears.
For example, there is a panel with Willy Ley and Isaac Asimov
and Fritz Leiber and L. Sprague de Camp and Ed Emsh and Leigh
Bracket, and the topic is "What Should a BEM Look Like?". (I have
a copy of the _Discon Proceedings_, a transcript of the entire
convention published by Advent, and to this day when I need a new
alien race I re-read that panel and invariably I come up with
one.)

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There was a panel with Fred Pohl and a tyro named Budrys and
a gorgeous editor (though not as gorgeous as the one I accepted a
Hugo for) named Cele Goldsmith and even ***John Campbell
Himself***, on how to write stories around cover paintings, which
was a common practice back then, and which remains fascinating
reading today.
There was a sweet old guy in a white suit who saw that we
were new to all this, and moseyed over and spent half an hour with