I Love Galesburg in the Springtime

If you are the sort of person who is wistful about: Trolleys Balloons (the kind you go up in) The New York El Ice-cream parlors Pre-digit dialing (even better, pre-dial phones) The Marmon roadster… This collection of light fantastic stories will fill you with nostalgia for the older, gentler ways; and, happily, it will assure you that some of those ways are still around. Consider, for example, the story about a brand-new house in a fashionable suburb built from eighty-year-old plans for a Victorian mansion— Or the one about Galesburg, Illinois, a town with a past it has never surrendered. Then meet the unusual young woman who fills her hope chest with power tools… and the coin collector who finds a Woodrow Wilson dime that buys his way into a world just a little bit different from this one (including a different wife)… and the ten-year-old boy (his friends are convinced he's presidential timber) who hypnotizes a dangerous tiger… Will you like these stories? Make this simple test—open the book right now, read the first page of any story, and just see if you're not hooked! ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jack Finney's reputation as an architect of the astounding seems to grow and grow. Along with innumerable short stories, his first three novels—Five Against The House, The Bodysnatchers, The House of Numbers—were built on wonderfully bizarre yet convincing plots. His latest, Assault on a Queen (1959), contained such an audacious story line that critics had no recourse but to write: "Ingenious and utterly fantastic…" [New York Herald Tribune] "Highly imaginative and intriguing…" [Columbus (Ohio) Citizen] "A piece of piracy Blackbeard would boggle at…" [Baltimore Sun] It is small wonder then that most people would be surprised to learn that Mr. Finney lives in quiet normalcy with his wife and two small children in Mill Valley, California.