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Once again a French imprint comes up with a violent cover. On the front of Guy Mouminoux's 1953 graphic novel Du sang dans la sciure—“blood in the sawdust”—a fight is going poorly for one guy who looks headed to a cosmetic surgeon or a mortician. We don't make that statement randomly. This very thing happened to a friend of ours and cosmetic surgery was the result. We have an entire collection of fighting paperback covers, and if you're interested you can see it here.
You know why I'm great at my job? Because I'm sweating like a racehorse in this get-up and you can't tell.
French artist Alex Pinon knocks this cover for the spy thriller Mission spéciale à Rio out of the park with his black clad femme fatale and backdrop of Guanabara Bay and its famed Sugarloaf Mountain. Since Rio's average daily temperature never drops below 80 Fahrenheit, no Brazilian would actually dress like this, at least not during daytime, but the art is great. The book was published by Société des Éditions Nouvelles Valmont and its author called himself Commandant René. You're probably assuming that's a pseudonym, and you're right. It was used by Jacques Dubessy, Guy de Wargny, Henri Certigny, and other authors. Between them they wrote more than thirty books as this Commandant person, with the above coming in 1959. We have a lot of French art in the website, so poke around if it interests you. We'll have more soon.
Hiding behind her won't help you. She's my wife, and this morning she demanded a divorce.
Here's another cover to add to our collection of women being used as human shields, Faut pas me la faire by Robert Chirze, aka Georges Claveyre-Peyre, for Éditions le Trotteur's collection Les Grandes Roman Noirs, 1953. The art is a particularly nice example of the work of Alex Pinon, and you can see another piece here.
Shake ya popotin, but watch yourself. Above, a cover for Elle ondule du popotin, written by Jack Norton for Éditions Le Trotteur’s Collection Paprika and published in 1953. Norton was of course a pseudonym, in this case for Jean de Backer, who also wrote as Jacques Norton, Henry Ghils, and others. The title of this translates rather provocatively as “she sways her ass,” which is exactly what the artist seems to have been trying to depict with this femme fatale in sheer lingerie. That artist was Alex Pinon, a favorite of ours. We haven’t really begun to share his work the way we’d like, but we will, and in the meantime, if you click over to our keyholes collection from last July, you can see a few more Pinons there. By the way, “popotin”? That’s one of the funnier words for butt we’ve heard. Not great as a song lyric, but maybe we can work it into conversation sometime.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1931—Nevada Approves Gambling
In the U.S., the state of Nevada passes a resolution allowing for legalized gambling. Unregulated gambling had been commonplace in the early Nevada mining towns, but was outlawed in 1909 as part of a nationwide anti-gaming crusade. The leading proponents of re-legalization expected that gambling would be a short term fix until the state's economic base widened to include less cyclical industries. However, gaming proved over time to be one of the least cyclical industries ever conceived. 1941—Tuskegee Airmen Take Flight
During World War II, the 99th Pursuit Squadron, aka the Tuskegee Airmen, is activated. The group is the first all-black unit of the Army Air Corp, and serves with distinction in Africa, Italy, Germany and other areas. In March 2007 the surviving airmen and the widows of those who had died received Congressional Gold Medals for their service. 1906—First Airplane Flight in Europe
Romanian designer Traian Vuia flies twelve meters outside Paris in a self-propelled airplane, taking off without the aid of tractors or cables, and thus becomes the first person to fly a self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft. Because his craft was not a glider, and did not need to be pulled, catapulted or otherwise assisted, it is considered by some historians to be the first true airplane. 1965—Leonov Walks in Space
Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov leaves his spacecraft the Voskhod 2 for twelve minutes. At the end of that time Leonov's spacesuit had inflated in the vacuum of space to the point where he could not re-enter Voskhod's airlock. He opened a valve to allow some of the suit's pressure to bleed off, was barely able to get back inside the capsule, and in so doing became the first person to complete a spacewalk. 1966—Missing Nuke Found
Off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean, the deep submergence vehicle Alvin locates a missing American hydrogen bomb. The 1.45-megaton nuke had been lost by the U.S. Air Force during a midair accident over Palomares, Spain. It was found resting in nearly three-thousand feet of water and was raised intact on 7 April.
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