For the second year running, I attended the Windy City Pulp and Paper convention near Chicago. I will post a more detailed report later (probably this weekend), but for now I’ll just share a few of the photos I took.
The convention took place at the Westin Hotel in Lombard, the weather was perfect – sunny and cool. It turned a bit cloudy on Sunday afternoon.
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| Westin Lombard Hotel |
This year’s convention theme was the 90th anniversary of H.P. Lovecraft, and so the signs for the hospitality suite (drawn by Randy Broecker, the Chicago based artist) were in keeping with the theme:
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| Hospitality Suite Sign 1 |
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| Hospitality Suite Sign 2 |
The dealer room was an Ali Baba’s cave of pulps, but with much better lighting:
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| Dealer’s room at Windy City Pulp and Paper 2015 |
BTW, I did not saw people in half to take this photo, that’s what happens when you stitch together three photos and people are moving around.
As usual, there was a glorious display of art in the art display, much of it related to Lovecraft, made available for display by generous collectors who brought in art from their collections for display. Included were many illustrations by Virgil Finlay, Ed Emshwiller and at least one by Hannes Bok. Want to read a more detailed biography of Virgil Finlay? More of his amazing artwork can be seen in the book The Collector’s Book of Virgil Finlay, available from http://www.americanfantasypress.com/. I have the book, and it was wonderful to see the originals for the illustrations in the book.
I apologize for the reflections and occasional glare on the photos – the room had many light sources all around and the illustrations had been framed with glass, so reflections were unavoidable, I tried to keep them to a minimum by photographing at an angle as opposed to straight ahead, but sometimes I had to choose between having some reflection/glare/both or no photo at all. If you want to see a slideshow of the art in higher resolution, just click on the first image below.
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| H.P. Lovecraft portrait by Virgil Finlay |
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| Illustration by Virgil Finlay for The Shunned House |
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| Illustration by Virgil Finlay for The color out of space |
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| Illustration by Virgil Finlay for Halloween in the suburbs |
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| Illustration by Joseph Wirt Tillotson for The court of Kubla Khan |
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| Cover by Ed Emshwiller for Jack of eagles |
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| Cover by Ed Emshwiller for The Big Planet |
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| Cover by Ed Emshwiller for The Garden of Time |
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| Cover by Ed Emshwiller for Galaxy Magazine |
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| Cover for Argosy Magazine |
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| Interior artwork by Virgil Finlay for The Ship of Ishtar |
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| Interior artwork by Virgil Finlay for The Ship of Ishtar |
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| Interior artwork by Virgil Finlay for The Ship of Ishtar |
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| Interior artwork by Virgil Finlay for The Ship of Ishtar |
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| Interior artwork by Virgil Finlay for The Ship of Ishtar |
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| Cover painting by Ed Emshwiller for Granny won’t knit |
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| Cover painting by Howard Brown for The Shadow out of Time |
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| Gahan Wilson illustration for a book in the Cthulhu mythos |
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| Gahan Wilson illustration for a book in the Cthulhu mythos |
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| Illustration by Hannes Bok for The cats of Ulthar |
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| Illustration by Virgil Finlay for The Black Butterflies |
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| Interior illustration by Virgil Finlay for The fifth candle |
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| Illustration by Virgil Finlay for The Golden City |
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| Illustration by Virgil Finlay for The Hairy Ones shall dance |
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| Illustration by Virgil Finlay for Citadel of Fear |
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| Illustration by Virgil Finlay for Dread Summons |
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| Illustration by Virgil Finlay for The Slayer of Souls |
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| Cover painting by Ed Emshwiller for Let’s build an Extraterrestrial |
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| Cover painting by Ed Emshwiller for Strange Nestling |
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| Illustration by Virgil Finlay for Tcheriapin |
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| Cover painting by Ed Emshwiller for Space-time in one tough lesson |
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| Cover painting by Edgar Franklin Wittmack for People’s magazine |
The dealers’ room also had its fair share of art:
And of course, pulps everywhere:
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| Pulp reprints from Black Dog Books |
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| Robert Weinberg’s dealer table – art prints, pulp reprints and audio books from RadioArchives.com |
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| Pulp reprints from Adventure House |
And even more pulps at the Friday and Saturday night auctions, some of which went for high prices:
That’s it for now folks. I hope you’ve seen enough reasons to attend either Windy City next year or Pulpfest. Thanks to the organizers, Doug Ellis and John Gunnison
Great photos Sai! In fact so great, that I've told Steve Lewis of Mystery File to go ahead and use some when he posts my detailed convention report. One of the highlights was talking to you of course. I'm already looking forward to Pulpfest. It's a simple fact that you can never have too many pulps. My report should be up within a couple days and you can relive the fun we had buying pulps and pulp art!
Thanks, Walker. Let me know if you need anything else – I'll dig through the ones I haven't posted yet and see if I've got it.
The whole point of the visit was of course, talking to you and all the other collectors, dealers and nice people I met there during the course of 2 days. When I post, I'm afraid i'll miss out some names, so I decided just to post the photos and make sure I don't miss out anyone when I write up my trip report. I'll look forward to reading yours as I do always.
I'm looking forward to Pulpfest too, if I can make it.
Yes, great photos Sal – I'm going to put a link to this post on my blog. If you don't have the new address, it's http://www.laurieswildwest.wordpress.com. Glad you all had a good time.
Hi Laurie, welcome back. Thanks for the compliments and sorry we didn't see you at Windy City. I will try to get to New Orleans some time, though attending two events back to back in the same month is hard.
Your blog was sorely missed. Good to see it's back. Here's something that might help restore some of the older content while you're fighting with Blogspot.
There is a snapshot of your older site available on the Internet Archive. The snapshot is from Dec 2014, which means that posts newer than that are not going to be available, but hey, it's a start.
Go to https://web.archive.org/web/20141217155332/http://lauriepowerswildwest.blogspot.com/ to see the older articles. You will have to navigate them yourself and select what to copy out, but at least you can save some of the content. Hope this helps.
Anyone who's blogging, take heed:
1. Take regular backups of anything you post and keep them in a separate place so that they won't be lost.
2. Submit your site to the Internet Archive Wayback machine (https://archive.org/web/) and at least some of the content will be preserved in case something bad happens.
Looking forward to hearing from you on the new blog.
Also see the complete archive of all content in your blog:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://lauriepowerswildwest.blogspot.com/*
Thanks for the information about how to access the contents of Laurie's older blog. Many times I looked up old articles by googling them and when they were deleted I was stunned. I went around cursing the temporary nature of the internet but maybe things are not as bad as I thought.
It's a shame Laurie missed Windy City. I know she would have been very happy to attend and go broke buying pulps like the rest of us. But Pulpfest looms.
Does anyone know who the art dealers were… I am trying to track down an Ed Emshwiller painting? I was supposed to go this year but last minute wasn't able to. Definitely next year! Great photos and report Sai. Almost feel like I was there 🙂
One I know for sure was there was Taraba's illustration art. They had a Rafael De Soto original on display, but I don't recall seeing an Emsh. Perhaps someone else who reads this can help.
Craig Poole had an Emsh preliminary which I bought. It was for the ASTOUNDING December 1958 cover. The Eisensteins have been big Emsh collectors for decades and they had several covers on display in the art exhibit but they were not for sale.