I found a copy of the May, 1942, Astounding on sale today--for ten cents!
...OK. It's a goddam pulp magazine, for chrissakes. They're all 65-100 years old these days. They were meant to be read, then dissolve. I used to have a box of old pulps from my Dad I kept in a metal box, and I finally couldn't even touch them because they'd dissolve on contact. But there I was today at a thrift store, and in the back they had some old magazines in a pile, a dime each. There were some post-1942 SF digest mags, some mystery mags, towards the bottom of the stacks some World War Two-era Lifes and Saturday Evening Posts--and near the very bottom, a May, 1942, Astounding. A pulp. In still-readable condition. Oh, the pages were browned and a little flaked. But the cover was intact, and the pages could still be opened and turned without too much trouble. If I read it a whole bunch of times, it would probably fall apart. But for now, it's still a magazine, and not a pile of dust. And why is the May, 1942, Astounding so important? Because it's the very height of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, those years from 1938-45 when all the ideas of modern SF were being invented and perfected--and in many cases, never approached since. Ideas that have percolated into our culture as a whole. What's in this issue? Well, van Vogt's *Asylum*, a story about interplanetary vampires that is just a total gas. It has a very strong noirish feel, and a dream-dust quality about it that's all its own. It also has the final installment of Heinlein's *Beyond This Horizon*, SF's greatest Utopian novel--even greater than H G Wells' books, in my view--the only Utopia I'd ever want to live in myself. Tremendous vitality, like all of Heinlein's works...and his ethical answer to genetic engineering propounded here is being taken more and more seriously, as reality catches up to SF. It also is where the sentence, "an armed society is a polite society", originated. It's still a great novel. But even this isn't the highlight of the issue, because it also has a short story by a very young Isaac Asimov called *Foundation*. The first Foundation story! It's no wonder this is regarded as the greatest single SF magazine of all time. Somehow, the Pulp Gods preserved this issue for 75 years, and placed it where I could find it and buy it. For a dime! This is the greatest treasure I've ever found in a lifetime of searching for old books and mags in used book stores and thrift shops...:-D
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A few pics would be very welcomed by DU's nerdier nerds. 
Congratulations! 
