Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9 — page 77: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Ph. Unopeakable Batrothal D Ribeet Blt Robert Bloch, whose first serious novel The Scarf is now available in a popular thirty-five cent Avon edition, has rung up a remarkable record for a young writer.. It is with pleasure that we state that “The U nspeakable Betrothal” 1s a brand-new story, here published for the first time. The tale of a beautiful girl marked by the stars for an outré destiny, it will be a find for the army of Bloch fans. It was written originally for an Avon pocket-size anthology oj new fantastic stories . . . from which space restrictions were to bar it. This new anthology, enutled The Girl with the Hungry Eyes, edited by the editor of the Avon Fantasy Reader, is now available on newsstands—or it may be purchased direct from us for a quarter, plus five cents handling charges. it Jeatures really excellent original fantasy stories by Fritz Leiber, Jr., Manly Wade Wellman, William Tenn, P. Schuyler Miller, Stephen Grendon, and Frank Belknap Long. Look for it. : 3 “Not far thence is the secret garden in which grow like strange flowers the kinds of sleep, so different one from the other... the sleep induced by datura, by the multiple extracts of ether, the sleep of belladonna, of opium, of valerian; flowers whose petals remain shut until the day when the pre- destined visitor shall come and, touching them, bid them open, and for long hours inhale the aroma of their peculiar dreams into a marvelling and bewildered being.” : ; Proust: Remembrance of Things Past , peont /VIS knew she wasn’t really as sick as Doctor Clegg had said. She was merely bored with living. The death- impulse, perhaps; then again, it might have been nothing more than her distaste for clever young men who persisted in addressing her as “O rara Aus.” She felt better now, though. The fever had settled until it was no more than one of the white blankets which covered her—something she could : Be)