Hot Money For Canada

A few minutes ago, I treated myself to a neat little collectible.

I spent a good part of the afternoon yesterday tracking down covers to the German Black Bat novels that came out in the 60's and 70's.

Schwarze Fledermaus is the undeniable authority on the subject. Unfortunately it appears to be the only resource to speak of. My concern is that if the website is done away with, for whatever reason, all that information will be lost. That includes hundreds of cover scans that are otherwise quite hard to come by.

Now I don't want to copy the data displayed on SF. I want to complement and, frankly, better it where I can.

Perhaps I was just luckier than during past attempts, but I was able to score a number of these covers from ebay.de. And in doing so, I decided to pick up one of the books for my little collection.

"Hot Money For Canada" caught my eye because I'm, well, Canadian.  Mind you, I doubt that Canada figures prominently in the story as such. It's probably more about a scheme to transport items across the border illegally or something.

That's not particularly important, to tell the truth. The book was inexpensive (about $10 American, shipping included) and just happened to have a theme that interested me.

Is this a good time to mention that I don't speak or read German? This is going to be the slowest read for me in some time. Still, I want to be able to comment on these books with some first-hand knowledge so this will make for a good introduction.

As for the couple of dozen cover images I managed to locate to this point, I've begun building a page from which to display them. It is, of course, included under the banner up top. I've added translations of cover text where I've been able to make (relative) sense of it.

Since they were lifted from ebay listings, I take no credit for the original scan. However, all images have been resized, cropped, straightened, sharpened and/or submitted to colour adjustments. That's not in an effort to take credit, it is simply to make the graphic more appealing.

You may have noticed a new page for Moonstone Books covers as well. That's also in the building stages now that Moonstone has several Black Bat irons in the fire.

Good way to start the new year!