 It's lovely out here, but the serenity and quiet just magnify everything about each other we dislike.  
Barye Phillips handled the cover chores for Ted Stratton's 1954 novel Wild Breed, and as you can see by looking at the original reproduction we've included, the piece he produced was fine art adjacent. At least it looks that way to us. Compared to much of his other work, the detail here suggests a different frame of mind in execution, if not even a planned usage outside the realm of paperback covers for the finished piece. Its dimensions normally would have required that the work be radically cropped, but Fawcett Publications solved that by placing a solid rectangle at top to hold the text and Gold Medal logo, reducing the required trimming to a minimum. The editors knew quality when they saw it.
 It’s true I’m a little devil. But by morning you’ll say I made you see God. 
Above is a nice George Gross cover for Nora’s No Angel by Tom Stone, aka Florence Stonebraker, aka Ted Stratton. This came in digest format from Rainbow Books and you can see that Gross has his femme fatale dressed in the same style of off-the-shoulder drawstring blouse we pointed out before. We own the book, but our cover is a little jacked, so we borrowed one from online and touched it up a bit. Below, though, you see two interior pages we scanned (shots posed by models are common with these digests), plus the rear cover. We'll update this post when we get around to actually reading the book. It's 1951 copyright. Right, so we're writing in 2021 now, and here's your update. The surprise with this novel that took us years to finally read is that it's not the light sleaze you'd suspect, but a detective yarn starring a private dick named J. Gordon Ivers—Gordy to his pals. He takes a case for a rich woman who wants her son's tawdry affair broken up, but the girlfriend turns up dead and Ivers figures he needs to solve the murder in order to have an alibi. The Nora of the title doesn't appear until several chapters in, and indeed, the thrice divorced bombshell is no angel. This is a standard crime novel from Stonebraker, nothing special, but in branching away from sleazy romances she now seems like an author worth more exploration. We'll do that at the earliest opportunity.
  
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1939—Batman Debuts
In Detective Comics #27, DC Comics publishes its second major superhero, Batman, who becomes one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, and then a popular camp television series starring Adam West, and lastly a multi-million dollar movie franchise starring Michael Keaton, then George Clooney, and finally Christian Bale. 1953—Crick and Watson Publish DNA Results
British scientists James D Watson and Francis Crick publish an article detailing their discovery of the existence and structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, in Nature magazine. Their findings answer one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of biology, that of how living things reproduce themselves. 1967—First Space Program Casualty Occurs
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when, during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere after more than ten successful orbits, the capsule's main parachute fails to deploy properly, and the backup chute becomes entangled in the first. The capsule's descent is slowed, but it still hits the ground at about 90 mph, at which point it bursts into flames. Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission. 1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot.
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