Bill Edwards' profile as a paperback illustrator has risen considerably in recent years. Like others who painted for sleaze imprints, it is not so much his technical ability that has garnered the attention, but rather the subject matter and a strong style. Edwards is a guy whose work you can identify in a millisecond. His women almost always have sharp cheekbones, ski jump noses, and a prominent beauty mark. The cover above for Rick Rand's New Girl in Town shows you all three elements up close. Edwards was also prolific like few other painters, which makes finding his work easy. Below are many more illustrations, some for novels with subject matter well beyond the pale, and we have other Edwards pieces populating Pulp Intl., for example here, here, and here.

Whenever we say “someone” should do something that just means we’re being lazy. A couple of days ago we said we liked therapy sleaze fiction covers and someone should put together a collection. Well, that someone turned out to be us. We took a quick scuttle around the web and the result is this small group of people baring their souls—and sometimes more—to their therapists. In P.G. Wodehouse’s case, the main character of Lady Doctor is actually a medical practitioner, but since others confide in her and the awesome Dutch cover is psychoanalytic in style, we’ve included that. The last three examples come from Killer Covers, which is a site you should get into the habit of visiting regularly.

These two posters were painted by Sandro Symeoni for the Italian release of Rivolta al braccio d, which was originally made in the U.S. and released there as House of Women. The movie isn't lesbian sexploitation, despite what the poster portrays. It's actually a serious if b-budget black and white drama dealing with female felons and their children who are housed on site with them until age three. At that point the kids are sent to foster care or the women are paroled, whichever is appropriate. Thus the fear of losing their children is always a worry, and that of course comes to the fore when a cruel new warden takes charge of the prison. But is he cruel really? Or is it that he's just lonely and wants the right slinky feloness to thaw his heart? We won't go so far as to recommend Rivolta al braccio d, but we'll admit it's far better than it has any right to be. It premiered in Italy today in 1962.

Bonnie Logan, née Bonnevier Bakken, was a glamour model of the 1950s and 1960s who as of last year was still making public appearances in her late 80s. She starred inside and on the covers of scores of magazines, including Adam (the U.S. version), Man, Photo-Rama, Knight and many others. When you hear people say women were curvier back in the day, they’re thinking of women like Logan, who had 40-24-37 measurements and had to wear custom bras.

During her heyday she also sang, appearing regularly at the Floating Island Lounge in Los Angeles. She moved into burlesque and in that capacity traveled all the way to Japan, where, strangely, she was once clobbered on the head by a bat-wielding American hater. Of that incident she said, “I wore an elaborate blond wig at the time, and I used to tuck my real hair underneath it. That happened to be where the bat hit me. It probably saved my life.”

The sultry shot of her at top comes from a session that provided the cover for the issue of Rapture you see above and right. The magazine is from 1962, which helps us date the photo somewhat, but we're thinking the session occurred a bit earlier, say around 1960. We'll have more from Logan later, so stay tuned.

We have another collection today as we prepare to jet away on vacation with the girls. Since the place we’re going is known for rowdy British tourists (what place isn’t known for that?), we thought we’d feature some of the numerous paperback covers featuring fights. You’ll notice, as with our last collection, the preponderance of French books. Parisian publishers loved this theme. The difference, as opposed to American publishers, is that you almost never saw women actually being hit on French covers (we’d almost go so far as to say it never happened, but we’ve obviously not seen every French paperback ever printed). The French preferred man-on-man violence, and when women were involved, they were either acquitting themselves nicely, or often winning via the use of sharp or blunt instruments.

Violence against women is and has always been a serious problem in the real world, but we’re just looking at products of the imagination here, which themselves represent products of the imagination known as fiction. Content-wise, mid-century authors generally frowned upon violence toward women even if they wrote it into their novels. Conversely, the cover art, stripped of literary context, seemed to glorify it. Since cover art is designed to entice readers, there’s a valid discussion here about why anti-woman violence was deemed attractive on mid-century paperback fronts, and whether its disappearance indicates an understanding of its wrongness, or merely a cynical realization that it can no longer be shown without consequences. We have another fighting cover here, and you may also want to check out our western brawls here.

Collier’s isn’t the most visually striking of magazines, but this issue that hit newsstands today in 1954 caught our eye because it contains several nice photos of Marilyn Monroe. There’s also a bit of interesting graphic art, specifically a colorful baseball illustration by Willard Mullin. The other item that attracted us was a story called “What Price Security?” about U.S. government overreach in its search for communists. No art to speak of, but the content gives a window onto the Red Scare period of American life. Author Charlotte Knight tells readers that government efforts against communism have been “so irresponsibly administered that it may have done more harm to the United States than to its enemies.” Sound familiar?

Knight slams witch hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy, and characterizes the fervor around alleged subversives in Washington, D.C. as creating a ripe environment for paranoiacs and liars to ruin innocent people. But of course, as well written as Knight’s article is, she should not have been surprised by anything she discovered. Witch hunts always become vehicles for revenge, personal advancement, and profiteering, because society and politics become warped in such a way as to clear a path for these pursuits. History invariably judges such periods as human tragedies and political failures, though sadly, too late for the ruined and the dead. Scans below.

This photo shows American actress Jean Wallace and Hungarian actor Cornel Wilde, née Kornél Lajos Weisz, emerging from Los Angeles Superior Court after their marriage ceremony, which took place five days after Wilde was granted a divorce from his first wife Patricia Knight. Press stories described the wedding as quick because Wallace and Wilde had dated for perhaps five months. One newspaper told readers Wallace “married actor Cornel Wilde in a hasty ceremony… kissed the flustered Mr. Wilde hastily [and] hastily brushed aside the honeymoon…” Hasty or not, the marriage lasted three decades—a success by many measures, especially in Hollywood. The photo is from today in 1951. Side note: Wilde was famous for his haircut, which was unusual at the time and provided ample sport for gossip columnists, but his shaggy 'do influenced a generation of young men. 

This Adam from 1960 is one of parent company Knight Publishing Corp.’s special annuals and features Lynn Hayward on the cover, plus the similar-looking Sheika Moser on the overleaf, both beautifully photographed by Keith Bernard. Hayward never appeared anywhere again, as far as we can tell, but Moser starred in numerous magazine layouts, including several for Spree, Gala and Eyeful. Inside the magazine you get fact, fiction, humor, and all the other elements that characterize mid-century men’s magazines, including many more women. Among them are Cuban dancer-turned-actress Chelo Alonso, burlesque queen Candy Barr, model-actress Ann Atmar, and others.

On a side note, we haven’t talked about our recent trip to the U.S. yet because we’ve just been too busy, but we did manage to collect quite a few more pulp items you’ll be seeing in the coming weeks. This particular Adam is an internet find, and you can locate it yourself with minimal effort. However, we did buy a dozen actual, physical issues of unrelated-to-the-above, hard-to-find, and never-before-uploaded Australian Adam. The new discovery pushed our issue total for that imprint well above fifty. But those are for later. Today, it’s good old American Adam. We have more than forty scans below for your enjoyment.