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What are your favorite Edgar Rice Burroughs books?

 
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Fri Sep 01, 2017 12:25 pm    Post subject: What are your favorite Edgar Rice Burroughs books? Reply with quote

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I've spent many happy hours reading the entertaining works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. His rich imagination has inspired us all to envision fantastic worlds and dynamic characters -- especially when the covers of his novels are adorned by the spectacular artwork of artists like Frank Frazetta and Roy Krenkel.








ERB never attempted complex plots which held the reader in suspense as we wondered what unexpected revelation would answer the questions the author tantalized us with. Instead, the strength of his stories is rooted in his descriptions of amazing environments, strange citizens, and incredible creatures.







We journeyed to alien worlds, and we explored unknown lands. Those journeys took us to Pellucidar, Barsoom, and a fantasy version of Venus we desperately wished was real.







The adventures, the flashing swords, the gorgeous women -- it was the stuff dreams are made of, and ERB shaped his worlds with as much artistry as the great illustrators who decorated the covers of his novels.





And so, I pose these questions.

Which Edgar Rice Burroughs novels where your favorites? How old were you when they were an important part of your life? Which covers thrilled you the most?

Share your ERB experiences with us. Cool

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Custer
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Joined: 22 Aug 2015
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PostPosted: Fri Sep 01, 2017 2:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm afraid I came to ERB late - but the first few John Carter novels, available as free audiobooks from Librivox, certainly swing along pretty well!

The British paperback covers from a few decades back are quite fun too:




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Bud Brewster
Galactic Fleet Admiral (site admin)


Joined: 14 Dec 2013
Posts: 17016
Location: North Carolina

PostPosted: Thu Jan 24, 2019 8:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

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Back in the summer of 1975, I was just 27 years old and laid off as a baggage handler from Eastern Airlines for several months while I took a few art classes in college and collecting unemployment. During that time I spent several weeks working on the portrait of my father.

In those golden days I was driving around in a dark green 1969 Dodge Charger with a vinyl top while I chatted on my CB radio to truckers on the highway. My handle was "The Lucky Dog".

And through all this I was dating college girls who were in their earlier twenties. Cool






Some of my fondest memories from those days involved the pleasant daily routine I develped during that summer. I'd get up around 8:00, shower and dress, and then head for a local restaurant called The Dutch Kitchen. The decor was all woodwork and exposed beams, with lots of windows to let in the summer sun.









And there each morning I would eat a hearty breakfast before heading back to my bachelor apartment to spend the rest of the day immortalizing my father in oil and keeping a journal that documented each day's artistic progress.

That same journal contained my romantic musings about a certain young lady in some of my college classes, a true beauty whom I ended up marrying . . . and also painted several portraits of.

My point in all this self-indulgent reminiscing is to say that I vividly remember what I was doing during breakfast each morning at The Dutch Kitchen restaurant! I was reading the Pellucidar series by ERB, a concept that fascinated me.

An entire "world" inside the Earth, with it's own sun and it's own moon and a prehistoric landscape that wrapped around itself so that the distant horizon curved UP and over until the sky above became an upside-down terrain which looked like a planet's surface viewed from high orbit! Shocked

No movie has ever tried to present ANY of these concepts, much less the entire ERB world of Pellucidar in a story based on his novels.

The closest we've come is Frank Frazetta's magnificent cover art shown below, which almost manages to capture the concept of Pellucidar in his painting for Land of Terror, complete with the distant "up-curved" horizon and the floating moon above the landscape.






And he strongly suggested the idea in his illustration for a Castle of Frankenstein issue which used both the front and back covers to display Frazetta's magnificent painting.





But no movie has yet attempted a Pellucidar story that included all the magnificent concepts ERB gave us.
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