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.  

French illustrator Michel Gourdon died back in mid-March, but we didn’t have time to get together a proper post of his work. We’ve corrected that today, with a selection of ten pieces from this great artist. Gourdon, who was brother to the legendary Alain Gourdon (better known as Aslan), painted thousands of pin-ups, advertisements, movie posters, and especially book covers during his career. A small selection of the latter appears below, and you can see three more here.

We’re back to the French pulp today, with three covers painted by Aslan, aka Alain Gourdon, circa mid-1950s. Top to bottom you see Simone Balin’s Celle qu’on ne possède pas, Vivian P. Marcy’s Caresse moi, and Karl Brückner’s Trop jolie pour être honete. You can enjoy more Aslan by clicking keyword “Aslan” below. 

We’re back to the French pulp today, with R. M. Letenre and his 1953 thriller Carte grise pour vienne, number 18 for Editions le Trotteur’s series Espions et Agents Secrets. We also have his 1954 effort for the horror series Frayeurs, Jennifer filleule du diable. The first book is illustrated by Mik, and the second by Aslan. We found zero information on Letenre, even on the many French websites and blogs we frequent. We'll dig, as always. In the meantime, it seems like a good opportunity to mention that our pulp uploader (in the right sidebar) is working again, so how's about somebody research this Letenre for us and shoot us some data?

Harper Lee’s 1960 Pulitzer Prize winner To Kill a Mockingbird happens to be one of our favorite books. Actually, strike that. We think it’s one of the ten best American books ever written. So imagine our excitement when we found that the French hardback had been illustrated by Aslan, aka Alain Gourdon, one of the top artists of the pulp era. Interestingly, the title of the novel is slightly different in France. A rossignol is a nightingale, rather than a mockingbird. In French a mockingbird is a moquer, but that also means simply “to mock,” so that word would have given the title a slightly different meaning to the French. In any case, we love this cover.     

When we saw the above book in a Paris flea market stall, we wanted it for the Aslan art. But once we looked up author Maurice Dekobra, aka Maurice Tessier, we discovered to our surprise that he was one of the most famous French writers who ever lived. Dekobra started as a subversive author in the 1920s, and pioneered a style of writing called documentary fiction, which is to say, fiction based upon factual investigation of the subject matter. Dekobra used his new techniques as he shifted into whodunits after World War II, and perfected what is now a standard operational model for mystery and thriller writers. In 1951 Dekobra, whose signature style resulted in “dekobrisme” coming into use as a French adjective, was rewarded for his extensive output with the Prix du Quai des Orfèvres literary award. It’s rather embarrassing not to have known about someone who has his own adjective, but we’ll make up for it by getting all dekobrisme and finding out more. We’ll report back later.     

Four pulp novels from Editions de l'Arabesque, the Parme collection, with covers painted by Alain Gourdon, who achieved considerable artistic fame under the pseudonym Aslan.