Above, the cover of Amy Harris’s 1962 novel Touch Me Gently, in which a woman’s personality changes after she’s attacked and violated during a midnight dip in the local swimming hole. The virgin-to-vengeful-vamp transformation triggered by a rape is an all-too-common scenario found everywhere from sleaze fiction to ’70s sexploitation cinema to Japanese pinku films. On the one hand it’s always highly distasteful; on the other it acknowledges the existence of these terrible events and allows women violent revenge. In terms of artistic merit, you have to judge on a case-by-case basis. But that’s what it’s always about with difficult subjects, isn’t it? Done right, valuable understanding can result. The cover art by Paul Rader is excellent. No problem understanding that at all. 

No, it doesn’t look like that to us either. Don’t get us wrong. It isn’t bad. But top sixty? Ever? Yet we found it on a site that included it in its top sixty, along with a collection of other covers of which we can honestly say only three were excellent. There was not one Fixler or Aslan to be found. Nary a J. David, nor a Peff, nor even a hint of a Rader. Clearly, whoever put the feature together took sixty random images off Flickr (yet watermarked the art they borrowed) and called it a day.

This highlights one of the main problems with the internet: it’s difficult to know which sites are primarily focused upon providing information, and which exist solely to generate traffic revenue. A site can do both (as we try to do here with our very minimal ad presence), but when some corporate pulp site that possesses endless resources somehow misidentifies the pulp era as lasting from the 1950s to 1970s, and asserts that the term “pulp” was popularized by the movie Pulp Fiction, it’s clear that information has not only taken a back seat to traffic revenue—it’s being dragged 100 feet behind the car on a rope.

We would never presume to do something as subjective as select the best covers of all time, because who the hell are we? But we have, we hope, earned some credibility over the last three years. So on this, our official third anniversary, we're going to do a pulp cover collection of our own. We don't claim these are the best—only that we like them very much. We’re posting twenty-four because we’re too lazy to do sixty, but we think all of them are winners. A few have already appeared on our site; most have not. So here we go. And thanks to the sites from which we borrowed some of these.  

A while back we posted a copy of the 1966 Amy Harris novel Prize Pupil with cover art of a frisky student applying herself in class, but we had no info on the artist. Well, in August the original art was auctioned from the Florida estate of pulp art collector extraordinaire Charles G. Martingette, and the auction info confirmed that this great piece was unsigned. So we may never know who painted it for sure, though there are couple of artists’ work it resembles. But there’s no point in speculating—since it was uncredited on the paperback and unsigned on the original, the only way we may find out who painted it for sure is if we get a cease and desist order for copyright violation. Our mailbox is open. 

Any educator will tell you the job can be a real grind. They have serious responsibilities, the most important of which is to resist advances from beautiful young students. But what’s a poor guy like this to do? It’s been a long, long time since differential calculus got his wife this excited.