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$3.50
Norton, Andre
THE TIME TRADERS [tt1]
book-date: 1958
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GRADING:
Ace
1974
4th
Paperback
Dean Ellis
$1.25
VG+ to near-Fine

This looks unread, but back cover has 4" fold-trace at top (left.)

One of the 2 best covers for this book - nicely captures a scene / the central concept of the book. P. Schuyler Miller once said this about Norton's "Time Trader" series: "...the richness which Andre Norton lavishes on her portraits of the wonder-worlds of the Universe, the subtle warmth of the empathic relations she portrays between men and mutated animals... and above all the mysteries she suggests and half-reveals but does not explain away with rationalizations - these, in the words of another book, are stories, O my brothers!" I agree, and will cheerfully recommend any of the first 4 in this series (...but not the co-authored later entries.)

The Time Traders is one of my favorite books by Norton, and I've read my copy many times, but long ago - for a decent plot summary/set-up and some commentary on Norton, I rely on P. Schuyler Miller, and use an excerpt from his review in Astounding/Analog (May 1960):
"… Ross Murdoc, a young "rebel without a cause," finds himself an "impressed" volunteer in a hush-hush Government time-traveling corps. Russia, it appears, is tapping some lost civilization of the far past for a series of potentially disasterous inventions. Our own agents have scattered themselves through prehistory in the hope of picking up the treasure-trail. Ross soon finds himself in Neolithic England as one of the "Beaker People," a trading folk who carried their characteristic pots all over Europe at the beginning of the great folk migrations.

He lands in England just as the trading post is destroyed by the "wrath of Lurgha" - a Soviet bombing raid. He and his more experienced partners follow a trail of clues into the eastern Baltic, then via the Soviet time-shuttle to Ice Age times, where the Russians have found not a lost civilization but the wrecked ship of an interplanetary empire. Soon the space people are involved… a wave of another migrating folk, the "Battle-Axe People," intervenes… and the plot grows happily tangled. The period is colorful and by no means stale, the details of the time-bases are nicely worked out, and the Aliens are properly menacing. In short, it's a grand job." [-P. Schuyler Miller]