The Chessmen of Mars

256 Pages. Ace Science Fiction Classic F-170 40c. Publication date not given but about 1962. Tight, square book showing only minor wear. The only mark is the number five in red on the front page edges indicating this is the fifth book in this series. This Ace Edition follows the text of the first hard cover book edition, originally published in 1922. Cover art and title page illustration is by Roy Krenkel, Jr. Edgar Rice Burroughs was gifted with a limitless imagination. With it he created an entire culture for a vast planet-many races, many peoples, strange creatures and stranger plants, an entire history stretching back through eons of time, and extending itself into the future with scientific inventions only dreamed of even in our own time. His imagination was coupled with an ability to write startlingly graphic prose, vivid with color and excitement, seething with action and rich with the barbaric splendor of bygone ages. In this book, Tara of Helium, the Warlord's beautiful and spirited daughter, is carried away by the vast winds of a violent Martian storm. Tara brings her small one-man flyer down safely enough-but she is stranded in a strange part of Barsoom, where magnificent rykors--beadless bodies--work like cattle at the mercy of their pitiless masters, the kaldanes--creatures which are all bead and no body. And this is not all, for in trying to escape from tbe kaldanes Tara is captured by the city of Manator where she becomes the prize in the Martian game of chess, jetan-played with living pieces-and played to the death. Contents in 22 Chapters: Tara in a Tantrum, At the Gale's Mercy, The Headless Humans, Captured, The Perfect Brain, In the Toils of Horror, A Repellent Sight, Close Work, Adrift Over Strange Regions, Entrapped, The Choice of Tara, Ghek Plays Pranks, A Desperate Deed, At Ghek's Command, The Old Man of the Pits, Another Change of Name, A Play to the Death, A Task for Loyalty, The Menace of the Dead, The Charge of Cowardice, A Risk for Love, and At the Moment of Marriage.…