526 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Ray Bradbury Collection Donated to the University of South Carolina by Anne Farr Hardin. “You usually don’t know you’re collecting until you realize you need more shelves,” says Anne Hardin, decades-long friend of celebrated author Ray Bradbury, whose work shaped the fantasy, sf, horror, and mystery fiction genres. Born 100 years ago (22 August 1920), Bradbury is most known for his novels Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The Martian Chronicles (1950), and The Illustrated Man (1951). Hardin’s Bradbury collection, which she recently gifted to the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at University of South Carolina Libraries, grew over the decades. The collection includes rare and one-of-a kind books, artwork, photographs, fanzines, pulps, and more. Hardin’s friendship with Bradbury began in 1982 when she was editor of the International Trumpet Guild Journal. She wrote to the L.A. Times seeking permission to reprint Bradbury’s poem, “Satchmo Saved,” about Louis Armstrong; the newspaper forwarded her request to Bradbury, who responded directly to Hardin. They continued to correspond for the next 13 years, and many letters included gifts. “Every time I turned around, there was a package in the mail. He sent me special editions or valuable copies of Fahrenheit 451 or The Martian Chronicles just because he wanted me to have them. It was all about our friendship,” she says. After more than a decade of correspondence, a message on her answering machine changed everything. “I came home from work one day when I was a middle-school band director. There were lots of messages on my machine—and one of them was from Ray. I just about fell over,” she says. “He’d sent me a poem, 'Just Gimme That Brass.' He’d had a dream of hearing that poem put to music, and wanted to know if I could have it performed at the Trumpet Guild’s 20th anniversary conference the following year if he could get it set to music.” At the conference the following year, she finally met him face-to-face, along with his guest, Hollywood composer David Raksin, who had set the poem to music. “I tried to act like I wasn’t stunned,” she says. From 1995 until Bradbury’s death in 2012, Hardin and Bradbury spoke and met regularly. “My husband Jim and I went to L.A. for Christmas in 1997, and at dinner, Ray had a gift for me,” Hardin says. “As soon as I opened it and saw a bit of aluminum, I knew what it was—the aluminum edition of Fahrenheit 451—it’s my favorite gift. He’d rolled it up in Christmas paper and used postage stamps, instead of tape, to secure it,” she says. “At the time, there was no easy way to find special-edition books, and this was a rare, promotional book I didn’t think I would ever have.” Other favorites in Hardin’s collection include the very first off-the-press copy of the first edition of The Martian Chronicles, which Bradbury dedicated to, inscribed, and gave to his wife Marguerite. Another favorite is a first edition of Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), which Bradbury inscribed and gave to actor Gene Kelly, and then inscribed a second time to Hardin. 527 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE “One of my favorite items showed up in the mail one year. It’s a little Halloween tree that you hang pumpkins and ghosts on. Ray bought a bunch of these trees for his friends that year. You can see the price tag is still on the box. He bought it at Kmart for $6.99. He just loved Halloween,” she says. One of her fondest memories is Bradbury’s book signing at a DragonCon in Atlanta. The event organizers didn’t have anyone scheduled to help. “I promptly got this large crowd organized and in line, explained the two-item limit, and stood beside Ray and opened each item for him to sign,” she says. “That day we grabbed a hamburger lunch at the hotel and talked like friends—not about the meaning of life, but about his...
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Oct 10, 2020
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