Thresholds of Tomorrow
There's Vance selling someone else's books again...
It’s one of Pelley’s more obscure titles and yet one that holds a special place for me as it was one of the first second-hand items I added to my personal collection. The copy I came by also featured a rather uncharacteristic blue cover, while most WDP volumes are red.
Thresholds of Tomorrow is also interesting as it was the only Pelley book that had first been circulated in audio format, as the Magic Casements tape reel series. I have never heard any of the Magic Casements recordings and I don’t know that they were ever converted from their original reel-to-reel format.
I have to assume that the broadcasts were composed. I would love to see a transcript or hear a voice recording of Pelley in extemporaneous speech, but as what I have seen described, even by his adversaries, as a “high-speed copy writer,” Pelley was most comfortable rattling those typewriter keys.
I have read that the dictation of messages for which he was the channel were taken down by a secretary stenographer and typed up later. I have read transcripts of my own interviews or radio broadcasts and thought to myself, “That’s pretty good! With just a little editing that might even be better than what I could have written on the subject.”
So, Pelley in conversation versus Pelley in writing? I want to believe the man was so at-home with his words that the two were much the same. He spoke as he wrote.
There are pages of court transcripts which demonstrate this. His answers to questions before HUAC were fluent and literary. Again, I am reminded of what his daughter Adelaide told me about her Pop at a given social gathering. Within five minutes a crowd would have gathered around him as he “held court” on whatever the topic, whether politics, metaphysics or a homespun tale of anecdotal Americana. I love those last, so often salvaged from the columns of Cogitations in Valor magazine.
I’m editorializing…
What I’m on about is, someone needs to own this book. This looks to be a clean copy and the seller is asking a fair price and reasonable postage. Tell them Vance sent you…