 What do you mean my squirming is throwing off your aim? Screw you! I hate this idea! When do we switch places?  
French illustrator Jef de Wulf painted so many covers for Editions de l'Arabesque that he was almost an in-house employee, and here we see him again on the art chores for Paul S. Nouvel's 1960 thriller Crapahut. You also see the original art, and can see the hole left for the publisher's logo, because why waste paint when you don't have to? Crapahut, of course, translates into English as “outhouse.” Actually, that's not correct. We don't know what crapahut means. We think it's a place. A place you can smell from miles away. Update: We got two answers on this, the first from Jo:
About the book named Crapahut, I can tell you it's a soldier's training, very hard and difficult. It's a slang word used first by military people (warrior's path?). You can use it also to speak about a long and difficult hiking in the mountains without any military sense. The second answer came from Jean-Marie: «Crapahut» from military slang, we have the verb «crapahuter» that means: walk, during war or battle if possible… with haversack very heavy, with arms, with enemy all around, into jungle, for 5, 10, 20 kilometers. Very hard. «Ha! qu’est-ce qu’on a crapahuté avant d’arriver à Danang,,, »
Thanks, Jo and Jean-Marie. Another mystery solved.
 I won! I knew I would once they restricted track and field to beautiful French actresses! Eat my dust Anouk Aimée! 
Catherine Deneuve absolutely flew in this race. It wasn't nearly as close as the art makes it look. Espions!.. à vos marques was written by Paul S. Nouvel, aka Jean-Michel Sorel, and published in 1964 by Éditions de l'Araesque. The cover is unsigned, but it's probably by Jef de Wulf. If we get more info we'll update this. We can't wait for the triple jump. Hopefully, Catherine will win that too.
 Sing? Are you serious? I can barely breathe in this outfit. 
We never want to go too long without an offering from the great French pin-up and paperback artist Alain Gourdon, aka Aslan, so above we have his cover for Macadam Sérénade, a thriller written by Paul S. Nouvel for Éditions de l'Arabesque. Nouvel was a pseudonym. The man behind it was French journalist/author/translator/editor Jean-Michel Sorel, who also wrote as Larry Layne, Arnold Rodin, Silvio Sereno, Tugdual Marech, Jan Mychel, Jean-Michel, Yvon Brozonech, Swani Abdul Hamid (we love that one), and many other identities. In all he produced more than one-hundred forty novels—and probably could have squeezed in a couple more if he hadn't been so busy thinking of pen names. 1955 on this.
 Keeping his eyes on the objective. 
We love this cover. It looks very much to us like the man who’s being choked was staring at a woman’s breasts and can’t take his eyes off them—even while being choked. That’s dedication. Y’en a marre… p’tite tête, by the way, means something like “fed up… little head.” Presumably that’s another of those French terms you have to be French to really understand. We'll await illumination via e-mail. Update: Jo B. comes to the rescue again: "Petite tête" means that you have no brain, that you forget everything you've got to do or that you've been told. It means also that you're absent minded. On the contrary, "forte tête" which means "strong head" is used to design a person with a rough character, who doesn't like rules, who contests everything, doesn't like discipline and is always against the law. In roman noir, he's a bad boy, quite a gangster, the guy who doesn't tell anything to the police even if he's tortured or beaten. As the expression is used on a roman noir cover, I would say that the "petite tête" is used to design a bad guy who ain't got any future in gangster life, who will never be a "forte tête," who will be a loser and say everything to the police if he's arrested. It's pejorative and insulting. Thank you again, Jo. You've been a great help, and thanks so much for continuing to visit the site.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1941—Japanese Attack Pearl Harbor
The Imperial Japanese Navy sends aircraft to attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet and its defending air forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. While the U.S. lost battleships and other vessels, its aircraft carriers were not at Pearl Harbor and survived intact, robbing the Japanese of the total destruction of the Pacific Fleet they had hoped to achieve. 1989—Anti-Feminist Gunman Kills 14
In Montreal, Canada, at the École Polytechnique, a gunman shoots twenty-eight young women with a semi-automatic rifle, killing fourteen. The gunman claimed to be fighting feminism, which he believed had ruined his life. After the killings he turns the gun on himself and commits suicide. 1933—Prohibition Ends in United States
Utah becomes the 36th U.S. state to ratify the 21st Amendment to the United States Constitution, thus establishing the required 75% of states needed to overturn the 18th Amendment which had made the sale of alcohol illegal. But the criminal gangs that had gained power during Prohibition are now firmly established, and maintain an influence that continues unabated for decades. 1945—Flight 19 Vanishes without a Trace
During an overwater navigation training flight from Fort Lauderdale, five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger torpedo-bombers lose radio contact with their base and vanish. The disappearance takes place in what is popularly known as the Bermuda Triangle.
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