Lionel Fanthorpe

I've run across Rev. Lionel Fanthorpe in the past, mainly as the presenter of Fortean TV, a series I haven't managed to get through thanks to the aggressive obnoxiousness of British 90's-ness.


I've run across him again recently, this time as the author of well over a hundred pulp sci-fi paperbacks in the 50s and 60s.  Operating under multiple pen names, he wrote most of the sci-fi and supernatural titles for Badger Books, an outfit had authors churn out fiction to match the covers they had procured.  Check out their awesomeness here.

He's still active, known mostly now for Fortean books and showing up on British TV.  I was thrilled to find a ton of his Badger Books stuff reasonably priced on Amazon, but I had some mixed feelings about the presentation.

The majority of the titles have a generic cover, though a few have the Badger classics.  The books are out by Hachette Book Group, one of the Big Five publishers.  One would think they would package the books more professionally, but I can understand the choice not to.  Based on some of my knowledge of Amazon ranking, I can tell that some of these titles have not sold a single copy in two years.

I would love to see these with the original covers, but it probably doesn't make sense financially.  Even if they still owned the covers, the rights management of it would cost more than they would recoup.  As it is, even if they already had nicely formatted .doc files of the text and just had an intern dump them all into KDP, they're losing money.  I'd rather have these gems available cheaply (or at all), than have to hunt them on ebay because it doesn't pay to reissue them.