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.

Above is a beautiful and lighthearted cover for No Time for Marriage by David Charlson for Venus Books, 1951, featuring a smiling femme fatale and her homme with his garish pin-up girl tie. The art isn’t attributed and Gary Lovisi’s reference book Dames, Dolls and Delinquents lists it as by unknown. But we think it’s by George Gross. Compare it to a cover confirmed as painted by Gross—One Wild Night, which you see just to the right. The general style is close if not identical, and the female figures on both covers wear drawstring puff sleeve blouses, necklaces, an assortment of gold bracelets, and the always popular ankle strap pumps.

We sound like we’ve been watching Project Runway for the last ten years, we know, but this is what obsessing over paperback art does to you. You also notice that the pose, facial features and hairdos on both covers are nearly identical too. While it’s true Rudy Nappi also painted in this general style for Venus, his hairstyles were usually less sculptural than what you see here. We also think the similarities of No Time for Marriage to other Gross covers are too great to ignore. In any case, we hope whoever painted it was well paid at least, because the same art was reused for Joan Tucker’s 1954 novel Young Secretary. 

Nothing kills romance like having to throw water over your flaming girlfriend. On the one hand you’d have saved her life. On the other, you'd spend the next decade hearing, “I honestly think you enjoyed drenching me.” Luckily that scenario doesn’t actually happen in The Lady Is Taboo. Instead it deals with a woman who believes she’s gotten sexually involved with a killer. Norman Bligh wrote it for Quarter Books in 1951, and the cover art is by the always wonderful George Gross. 

Above, an excellent George Gross cover, plus the original art, for Bed-Time Angel written by Norman Bligh, aka William Arthur Neubauer, for Ecstasy Novel Magazine, March 1951. 

In fashion they say it takes a confident woman to wear a red dress. In pulp, it takes a woman with a death wish. Below are fourteen pulp, adventure, and detective magazine covers illustrating that point, with art by Bud Parke, George Gross, Barye Phillips and others, as well as a couple of photo-illustrations.

It’s Super Bowl time again in the U.S., and as we did in 2009 and 2010, today we’re commemorating the occasion. This time we have a selection of five sports covers from acclaimed pulp artist George Gross. They were published between 1940 and 1951, and are alll college themed. No surprise there—collegiate ball ruled back then. But not today. Today the NFL is America’s passion, and Super Bowl Sunday is the day when even non football fans turn their attention to the sport. After revealing that we once lived in the Bay Area, is there any doubt who we’re picking to win tonight? That’s right—Baltimore in a walk. Just kidding. Chesapeake Bay has its charms, but when we say Bay Area we mean the one and only San Francisco Bay. So we’re backing the Niners, if for no other reason than football may be watching the emergence of a once-in-a-generation talent in Colin Kaepernick. If that’s the case, he can certainly announce his arrival big time with a Super Bowl victory. Final score: San Fran 24—Baltimore 20.

Update: Hey, we're writers, not seers of the future. If we actually knew who would win we'd be as famous as Criswell. At least it was a decent game .

 

It’s been a while since our last collection of animal attack magazine covers, so on this lovely Friday (at least where we are) we thought we’d give nature a chance to express its opinion about humanity. And its opinion is: “I hate all of you. Even the pretty ones.” We have eleven more examples of nature's unreasonable stance below, including a great piranha cover that features the one guy who in real life would know better than to be attacked being attacked. Anyway, just to give you an idea how many men’s magazines there were, and how pervasive this animal attack theme was, all the publications we've posted are different. There are actually even more, but we couldn’t locate good scans of those. Which reminds us to thank the original uploaders on these.

This cover scan of Archie Joscelyn’s 1950 western Border Wolves was sent over from National Road Books, which is good timing, because the art is by George Gross and we featured one of his very best pieces back in October and said we’d get back to him. Gross (who should not be mixed up with German painter George Grosz) was a prolific artist who, as we mentioned in that previous post, was incredibly diverse, producing covers for Argosy, Baseball Stories, Bulls Eye Detective, Northwest Romances, Wings, Fight Stories, Saga, and many others. He was born in 1909 in Brooklyn, New York, began painting pulp covers in the 1930s and worked steadily through the 1980s, dying at the ripe age of ninety-four. You would suspect, looking at the shooting technique of the cowboy on the cover of Border Wolves, that Gross didn’t know much about guns. While that’s possible, we think the weird shooting position is a result of wanting to fit the cowboy’s entire arm on the cover. But he must have liked the result, because he used this awkward stance twice (see below). There are quite a few web archives of Gross art, so if you want to see more, let your fingers do the walking.