title: The Vintage Bradbury: The greatest stories by America's most distinguished practioner of speculative fiction
author:  Ray Bradbury 
description: As tersely stated on the cover, this is "Ray Bradbury's own selection of his best stories." <i>The Vintage Bradbury</i> contains 22 classic stories, plus four chapters excerpted from his first mainstream novel, <i><a href="/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553277537/${0}">Dandelion Wine</a></i>. His career as an author was only about 15 years old when he compiled this volume in 1965 for the prestigious Vintage imprint. Like the vast majority of his collections, it has never been out of print. Bradbury's own selection of "his best" is also intriguing because most of the stories chosen are from the beginning of his career, and most are quite hauntingly sad. "The Illustrated Man" relates the ultimate fate of the tattooed title character from the novel of the same name. "The Fog Horn" is the tragic love story of a dinosaur who believes the horn's wail is actually that of his lost mate. "Hail and Farewell" tells of a 43-year-old man who is fated to never look older than 12. Although later upstaged by the truly definitive <i><a href="/exec/obidos/ASIN/0394513355/${0}">The Stories of Ray Bradbury</a></i>, this remains a fitting introduction to one of the world's great fantasists and prose stylists. <i>--Stanley Wiater</i>
zlib_text: **Table of Contents**
  
   **INTRODUCTION**
  
  ADAPTATION (1949)
  
   **Book Information**
  
   **ADAPTATION**
  
  from THE BEST OF JOHN WYNDHAM
  
  John Wyndham
  
  SPHERE BOOKS
  
  Published 1973
  
  ISBN 0 7221 9369 6
  
  Copyright© The Executors of the Estate of the late John Wyndham 1973
  
   **INTRODUCTION**
  
  AT a very tender age my latent passion for all forms of fantasy stories,
  having been sparked by the Brothers Grimm and the more unusual offerings in
  the children's comics and later the boy's adven-ture papers, was encouraged in
  the early 1930s by the occasional exciting find on the shelves of the public
  library with Burroughs and Thorne Smith varying the staple diet of Wells and
  Verne.
  
  But the decisive factor in establishing that exhila-rating ‘sense of wonder’
  in my youthful imagi-nation was the discovery about that time of back numbers
  of American science fiction magazines to be bought quite cheaply in stores
  like Wool-worths. The happy chain of economic circum-stances by which American
  newstand returns