Courtesy Marshall University

Nelson Bond, pictured here in the 1930s, wrote for radio and TV and published hundreds of magazine articles.

It's Nelson Bond week at the late Roanoke writer's alma mater, Marshall University in West Virginia.

Bond, a TV, radio and science fiction writer who died in 2006 at age 97, donated all his papers to the university between 2003 and 2006. The school in Huntington will dedicate a room of its library Saturday in Bond's name.

Bond, who attended Marshall in the 1930s, once said Marshall "turned me into a writer, and it also gave me the greatest joy of my life -- my wife."

Over his long career, Bond "wrote about bumbling space travelers, invisible companions, a great bird that would hatch from the Earth as from an egg, a secret race of superhumans who could walk through walls," noted Roanoke Times reporter and fellow science fiction writer Mike Allen in a 2006 appreciation.

Bond was an inspiration for legendary sci-fi writers Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, among others.

"We love Nelson Bond," said Barbara Winters, dean of Marshall Libraries. "He was quite a character."

She said the library room will include some of Bond's office items from the '30s and '40s, including his typewriter and his Dictaphone. "We even have a pack of Camel cigarettes."

Bond published some 257 stories in 68 magazines between 1935 and 1958, but may be best known for his radio and television scripts. Vintage television shows based on Bond's scripts of the '40s and '50s will be shown in the library all week. "His very wry sense of humor came through" in his TV scripts, Winters said.

Up Monday: "Al Haddon's Lamp," starring Buddy Ebsen. "Al Haddon's Lamp" aired on NBC's Gruen Guild Playhouse in 1952.

The library's Bond collection contains radio and TV scripts, plays, the original pulp fiction magazines his stories appeared in, manuscripts, fan mail, contracts, index cards and daybooks, Winters said.

The Nelson Bond Room grand opening will be attended by Bond's widow, Betty, and his sons, Lynn and Kitt, among others.

"He loved Marshall," said Lynn Bond of his father. "He loved what they did for him. This will be his legacy. He would have been very proud."

For more information, call Winters at (304) 696-2318.

Arts festival date change

The second annual Roanoke Arts Festival, originally scheduled for the first weekend of October, has been moved to the weekend of Nov. 8, festival manager Rick Salzberg said.

The reason is simple: The new $66 million Taubman Museum of Art also is scheduled to open on that date.

"We're going to correlate it with the opening of the art museum," Salzberg said. "We want to be a part of the excitement of that weekend."

"I hadn't heard that," said art museum external affairs director Kimberly Templeton. "But that's wonderful. It's going to be good for both of us."

Both said meetings would likely take place soon to coordinate the weekend's events.

"There will certainly be talks," Salzberg said.

The first arts festival was held last October. Plans were for the second arts festival to take place in October as well, until the art museum announced its plans to open on Nov. 8.

The museum's opening will be a kind of festival in its own right, with a ribbon-cutting, live music, appearances by celebrities and politicians and other events both inside the museum and out.

Holding the arts festival at the same time "is just a practical way to do things at this point," Salzberg said.

He also said this year's arts festival has been scaled back, from four days to three.