Oh, get off the floor silly. I didn’t drain all your energy. Above, The Love-Go-Round by W.E. Butterworth, 1962. Butterworth is better known as W.E.B. Griffin, an author who since 1960 has sold tens of millions of books in numerous genres, and notably co-authored the M*A*S*H series with Richard Hooker. The art here, which says so much by using so little, is by Barye Phillips.
Mid-century fiction’s love affair with the East produced scores of virtuoso bookcovers. It seems time for another themed cover collection, so today we’re sharing some of the scores of Asian styled mid-century paperback fronts we’ve seen. Much of the fiction here is offensive on some level, but then quite a bit of the old literature falls into that category. The art, on the other hand, is somewhat easier to look at dispassionately. So we have thirty-two paperback covers revealing the mid-century fascination with—or exploitation of—Asian archetypes, with art by Denis McLoughlin, Robert Maguire (identically on Ne-San and The Transistor Girls), J. Oval, aka Ben Ostrick, and more. Four or five of these came from Flickr, so thanks to the original uploaders on those.
If they were trying to avoid being remembered, they quite possibly succeeded. Above is cover art for Nikou Dobry’s La griffe du démon, aka The Devil’s Claw, published 1956 for Editions de l’Arabesque’s Parme collection. Dobry published several other books, but it’s likely the name was a pseudonym. With these French pulp writers, that’s often the case. One website suggests Dobry was a person named Pruneyrol, but we got zero hits on that name, so a real identification may be hoping for too much. And the art? It’s signed simply M. Boero. With all the false and incomplete identities surrounding French mid-century literature, you’d almost think they were ashamed of their work, but remember that American authors played the same tricks. For instance, sleaze pulps were often written by moonlighting popular authors. The same is probably true with the French. But we will keep digging, and eventually we will unmask them.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
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. 1912—Pravda Is Founded
The newspaper Pravda, or Truth, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country's leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid. 1983—Hitler's Diaries Found
The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler's diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess's flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison.
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