The first cut is the deepest. You see this cover for 1958’s Jack Spot—The Man of a Thousand Cuts around the internet quite a bit, especially on auction sites, because Hank Janson, aka Stephen D. Frances, is a very popular vintage author. But you don’t often see the back cover. Since we were talking about a spread-legged/phallic symbol motif yesterday, we thought we’d show you another example. The excellent art, which we found at a very interesting website here, is uncredited, so it seems. As far as content, the book is a biography of a notorious London gangster named Jack Comer, née Jacob Camacho, who as a youth became known as Jack Spot due to a mole on his cheek. Spot was quite a troublemaker, and used his knife-fighting skills and aptitude for vice to build and maintain a criminal empire that stretched from London to Tangier. Probably he deserves a heavier treatment on this website at some point, but we’ll see about that later. However, we can pretty much guarantee we’ll get back to Hank Janson, because he wrote numerous novels, and also created a character named Hank Janson who starred in some of the books, and, just for good measure, later stepped aside and let the pseudonym Hank Janson be inhabited by several other authors. Pretty convoluted, but it’s just the type of thing we love here.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1985—Theodore Sturgeon Dies
American science fiction and pulp writer Theodore Sturgeon, who pioneered a technique known as rhythmic prose, in which his text would drop into a standard poetic meter, dies from lung fibrosis, which may have been caused by his smoking, but also might have been caused by his exposure to asbestos during his years as a Merchant Marine. 1945—World War II Ends
At Reims, France, German General Alfred Jodl signs unconditional surrender terms, thus ending Germany's participation in World War II. Jodl is then arrested and transferred to the German POW camp Flensburg, and later he is made to stand before the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials. At the conclusion of the trial, Jodl is sentenced to death and hanged as a war criminal. 1954—French Are Defeated at Dien Bien Phu
In Vietnam, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which had begun two months earlier, ends in a French defeat. The United States, as per the Mutual Defense Assistance Act, gave material aid to the French, but were only minimally involved in the actual battle. By 1961, however, American troops would begin arriving in droves, and within several years the U.S. would be fully embroiled in war. 1937—The Hindenburg Explodes
In the U.S, at Lakehurst, New Jersey, the German zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg catches fire and is incinerated within a minute while attempting to dock in windy conditions after a trans-Atlantic crossing. The disaster, which kills thirty-six people, becomes the subject of spectacular newsreel coverage, photographs, and most famously, Herbert Morrison's recorded radio eyewitness report from the landing field. But for all the witnesses and speculation, the actual cause of the fire remains unknown.
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