Alan Bale
(???? – )
Alan Bale was a fan and bookseller from London active from the 1950s into at least the 1970s. He attended the BSFA Convention, 1960 and possibly others.
Bale managed one of the branches of the small London chain, the Popular Book Centre. Another branch was managed by the writer Arthur Sellings and George Locke worked in the Tooting branch during his college holidays. Sellings introduced first Locke and then Bale to the regular London fan meeting at The Globe. Locke recalled Bale as:
a young, slightly built man... who was a keen reader and collector of SF. We became friends and, to some extent, rivals.
At some point Bale opened a shop in Chiswick, west London, called Premier Book Centres where one of his employees was Derek Stokes, late of Dark They Were and Golden Eyed. Greg Pickersgill recalled buying then hard-to-find US imports from the duplicated foolscap mail-order lists issued by the Chiswick shop. He visited it once in company with Roy Kettle, a trip that was almost stymied as the shop was closed, but once Bale arrived and opened up so the next hour or so was spent:
sifting through masses of books and magazines of all kinds, endlessly computing how much I could afford to buy, and exchanging comments about books and so on with both Kettle and Bale.
Pickersgill specifically remembered several boxes purportedly containing a near complete run of Weird Tales with an asking price of £75.
Stan Nicholls also recalled the Premier Book Centre:
Alan was quite open about the fact that he launched his first Premier Books shop, in Chiswick, in imitation of the Popular Books chain. He offered a wide selection of used SF in the Chiswick shop but his innovation was to import new American science fiction and fantasy paperbacks. As far as I know, his was the first shop to do it.
While Bale was passionate about SF, he also had an even greater passion, Japanese swords, and he quickly became renowned as an expert in the field. In 1960 Bale married Penny Chandler, the daughter of A. Bertram Chandler.
Links
- "A Boy and his Bike – or, Searching for Science Fiction in 1950s London" by George Locke, Prolapse 11 (May 2008) at efanzines.com (PDF).
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