Thrift Shop Book Covers: "Conquest of Earth"

Conquest of Earth was published in 1957 as a hardcover by Thomas Bouregy and Company. It was originally published as a four part serial in the January, February, March and May 1956 issues of Amazing Stories under the title The Scarlet Saint. The edition that caught my eye is a mass market published by Airmont in 1964. The art is vivid and interesting. The sun blisters with what appears to be a man worshipping in the background while an astronaut looks skyward in the foreground. The artist: Unknown.

Manly Banister was mainly a short story writer whose work appeared, according to ISFDb, from the early-1940s to the mid-1960s. While I was researching him I found an interesting quote in his Contemporary Authors Online entry—

“‘The only motivating factor behind my writing,’ Manly Banister wrote CA [Contemporary Authors], ‘was desire to make a living without having to punch a time clock.... I wrote for Weird Tales Magazine, until it succumbed to reader apathy and suffered the ultimate fate of every magazine—extinction.’”  

The opening paragraph:

“After nineteen years, this was the day of days for Kor Danay. As he had expected, the day dawned clear; as bright as a turgid, blood-red Sun could make it, shining in a dry, cloudless sky that mellowed from almost black at the zenith to a deep indigo at the horizon. In their season, minus-magnitude stars like Sirius and Antares were spicules of light at high noon.”

This is the eleventh in a series of posts featuring the cover art and miscellany of books I find at thrift stores and used bookshops. It is reserved for books I purchase as much for the cover art as the story or author.