Last Thursday (May 7), the UAH Salmon Library’s Archives and Special Collections launched a new collection: The Windell Strickland Science Fiction Collection. The Windell SF Collection contains over 2500 paperback books from all throughout the 20th century science fiction genre and represents not only a significant boost to the amount of science fiction that we have at the Salmon Library, but looks at effectively an entire medium of books – the mass-market paperback – that the Salmon Library has not tended to carry.

In something of a plot twist, you *will* be able to check out these books, though through a different method than our standard system. There are books down in the Special Collection display in a special reading nook. You can take a couple of them and sign them out for up to a month. Right now we are trying out the honor system. The entire collection is over 2500 titles, so the few on immediate display are only a small portion. There is a finding guide you can use to request other titles while the archives is open (just ask an archivist). Even if you don’t want to borrow any books, it can be informative to see the genre as represented through several of its key decades.

There are a few titles that are marked as “in reserve” that, due to their age or other reasons, are not being added to the section that can be requested.

The Windell Strickland Collection was donated by his niece, Lisa Strickland, the Assistant to the Vice President, Finance and Administration, at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Windell Strickland was born in Dayton, TN in 1939, and went on to spend 25 years working as an engineer for the TVA. He started collection science fiction in the 1940s. He died on April 22, 2014, in Tuscumbia, AL.