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Pulp International - Harlequin
Vintage Pulp Oct 29 2023
WORLD OF HURT
Correction: the world's worst women that aren't your in-laws.


Above you see a 1955 Harlequin Enterprises cover for Bernard O'Donnell's biographical book The World's Worst Women, which contains profiles of twelve sunny delights such as alleged axe murderer Lizzy Borden, and Zoe Wilson, who did away with six husbands. This is a much more evocative cover than the 1959 version we shared a while back from Pedigree Books, but that's no surprise. This was painted by Paul Anna Soik, who worked with Harlequin quite a bit and helped establish the company as one that produced high quality visuals. Check out here and here

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Vintage Pulp Aug 30 2021
INTENSIVE CARING
Don't cry, nurse Caril. His organs will help others. Also, you have to admit he was an annoying little shithead.


There are doctor novels and there are nurse novels. We've kept close tabs on both types. Above is another nurse novel, Caroline Trench's Nurse Caril's New Post, from Harlequin Enterprises, a company that practically specialized in this genre. The cover is by Paul Anna Soik, someone we said years ago we'd get back to but never did. Well, now we have, and really, six years is pretty quick for us. At this point we usually link to all the similar books we've posted, but this time we'll limit ourselves to our three favorites: here, here, and here

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Vintage Pulp May 29 2021
MISS LONELY ART
Hey, since you need cheering up, wanna split this Toblerone bar with me? It's got nougat in it.


James Hadley Chase was a double winner in 1951. That year You're Lonely When You're Dead was published in paperback by both Popular Library, which we showed you here, and by the Canadian imprint Harlequin, as you see above, and both received top notch cover art. Popular Library went literal and showed a body on a deserted nocturnal beach. Harlequin's art is more general, with a woman under a looming shadow. Subliminally the shadow seems to carry a gun, but it really could be anything. It could be a letter, or a ruler, or a candy bar. In fact, on the subject of nonspecific, the painting could have been used for virtually any crime novel. There's nothing that definitively ties it to this particular story. But it's still a great effort. Unfortunately, it's uncredited.

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Vintage Pulp Feb 4 2019
FRONTIER INJUSTICE
Those dirty bushwhackers done hung him. And nobody else in the entire territory's got feet delicate enough to walk on my back when it acts up.


When we saw this paperback at the blog canadianflybynight we immediately had to share it because it serves as an addendum to our cover collection of unfortunates who've been hanged. We gather the story here deals with a corrupt syndicate ganging up to steal the land of a stubborn rancher. Somewhere in there the cowpoke with the daintiest feet in the west is cruelly strung up. The novel is originally 1939, and this Harlequin paperback with curious cover art by D. Rickard appeared in 1950. See our hanging collection here.

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Vintage Pulp Nov 10 2015
IT'S A WONDERFUL KNIFE
Hmm… an Englishman to gut with my new blade. And here I was planning to go home and shave my monobrow.

We were talking recently about Harlequin’s early days as a publisher of more than romance fiction. Above is another example—Bats with Baby Faces by W. Stanley Moss, a former British Army officer who wrote such best sellers as Ill Met by Moonlight and A War of Shadows. Bats with Baby Faces, the title of which references bat-like masks rather than actual bats, deals with intrigue and smuggling in the Deir-ez-Zor region of Syria, and in Cairo, where Moss lived in a villa that became a hub for the British social set. The most famous of his numerous real-life adventures occurred during that period, and that time also served as inspiration for much of his fiction. Harlequin’s edition of Bats with Baby Faces was published in 1952, and the cover art, with its mean caricature of an Egyptian who’s so swarthy he’s—bizarrely—purple, is uncredited. More Harlequin here and here.

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Vintage Pulp Oct 29 2015
APPETITE FOR INSTRUCTION
Good morning, students. Let’s get right to it, shall we? Lesson one will cover how to look fuckable.

Canadian publishers Harlequin are known these days as romance specialists but in the company’s early days it had more range. Exhibit A: Oliver Anderson’s School for Love, which deals with a learning institution where guys are taught to score babes, and upon graduation each automatically earn the affections of a wealthy widow. Why are there so many widows around? No idea. The war or something. When is a strapless leopardskin mini-jumpsuit appropriate? Anytime you want, when you have the whip skills to back it up. 1953 copyright. 
 
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Vintage Pulp Aug 15 2013
LONDON CALLING
Whatever gets you through the night.

Paul Anna Soik is another great pulp artist who we hadn’t gotten to previously, but better late than never, especially when we’re talking about this particular cover. The scene is London's Soho district near Charing Cross Road, and he presents an image of two listless souls in an urban night infused with streetlight glare, marquee glow, and a sort of carnivalsque seediness. We know the location because the Palace Theatre is in the background. The book is a realistic look at vice and prostitution, and we can assume the woman here is a hooker, though an improbably upscale one to be soliciting. But Soik lived in Canada, so maybe he wasn’t all that familiar with London street trade. This is a Harlequin book, and Soik was basically a Harlequin house artist who painted numerous covers during the company’s early years. This one, which we think is one of his best, appeared in 1955. We’ll have more from him later.

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Vintage Pulp Aug 5 2013
FASCINATION STREET
Where there’s smoke there’s desire.


Above is a cover for Ronald J. Cooke’s The House on Craig Street, produced by an artist known only as D. Rickard for Harlequin in 1949. That’s the year Harlequin was launched in Toronto, Canada, and we gather that Rickard painted many of the company’s early covers. We had actually seen his work around quite often without knowing who painted it. But we always took note of it, and now that we've attached a name to the output, we’re officially on Rickard's bandwagon. His style reminds us of many of the French covers we share—i.e., verging on impressionistic, as opposed to the realistic work you see from many of the top American artists.

Moving on to the fiction, Ronald J. Cooke’s tale here involves a young advertising man who wants to make it big, and the action is set mainly in Montreal of the 1930s. Though there is a love interest, or even two, this book isn't one of the romances with which Harlequin earned its enduring fame. Cooke went on to write two more novels, and some non-fiction, including books like the popular Money-Making Ideas for Retirees. He also wrote tons of business articles for magazines and trade publications, exciting stuff like “How To Get Better Results for Your Mail-Order Business” and “Labour-Management Ideas That Yield Big Dividends.”
 
D. Rickard painted another cover for The House on Craig Street for News Stand Library’s U.S. run of the book, which you see at right. Depicting the same scene, this alternate version, also from 1949, seems to us a bit less evocative than the Harlequin cover, almost cartoonish. Anyway, we’ll have more work from this interesting artist later, but if you want to see some now, follow the link to this small collection.
 
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History Rewind
The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
March 19
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.
March 18
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.
March 17
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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