 Return to sender, address unknown. 
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.
1963—Warren Commission Formed
U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson establishes the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. However the long report that is finally issued does little to settle questions about the assassination, and today surveys show that only a small minority of Americans agree with the Commission's conclusions. 1942—Nightclub Fire Kills Hundreds
In Boston, Massachusetts, a fire in the fashionable Cocoanut Grove nightclub kills 492 people. Patrons were unable to escape when the fire began because the exits immediately became blocked with panicked people, and other possible exits were welded shut or boarded up. The fire led to a reform of fire codes and safety standards across the country, and the club's owner, Barney Welansky, who had boasted of his ties to the Mafia and to Boston Mayor Maurice J. Tobin, was eventually found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. 1934—Baby Face Nelson Killed
In the U.S., killer and bank robber Baby Face Nelson, aka Lester Joseph Gillis, dies in a shoot-out with the FBI in Barrington, Illinois. Nelson is shot nine times, but by walking directly into a barrage of gunfire manages to kill both of his FBI pursuers before dying himself.
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