The National Police Gazette devoted much of its space to boxing. Above you see twelve pages, some originals and some reprints, from its monthly feature the Gallery of Champions. Of course, Jimmy Carter, at top, later went on to become president of the United States. Really a remarkable story. 

She was born Ann-Mari Birgitta Bengtsdotter Petré, but that’s a mouthful so she went by simply Gio Petré. Under that name she appeared in nearly thirty films between 1955 and 1974, mostly of the sexploitation variety, but also serious films such as Ingmar Bergman’s classic Smultronstället, aka Wild Strawberries. This shot is from the late 1960s.

Punchboards such as the one you see above originated during the 1700s, and by the early 1900s were being produced at a rate of millions per year. They hit the peak of their popularity during the 1930s and 1940s and were generally found in bars and other places of merriment. So, what were they? Basically, you’d pay pennies to select numbers and if you punched out the right one you’d win something. That something used to be money, which made these similar to lottery tickets, but when that type of gambling came under legal pressure from state governments, the prizes became goods such as beer, cigarette lighters or, in this case, cigarettes. What makes this Odd Pennies punchboard particularly collectible is the art by pin-up king Rolf Armstrong. Probably 1940-ish on this item. 

Update: We got an email from Joe R., who writes: "RE: the Lucky Pennies post, the Lucky Strikes package went from green to white in 1942 (the famous "Lucky Strike Green has gone to war" ad campaign), so there's a good possibility that this punchboard goes back to the 1930s.

Joe: Thanks for writing in. Now that you mention it, we think you're right. We took a detailed look around the interwebs and some of the other punch boards Armstrong illustrated actually go all the way back to the late 1920s, apparently. So mid-1930s seems like a good deduction on the date here.

We’ve explored several cover motifs in pulp art, and another we’ve grown to appreciate is the use of venetian blind shadows or silhouettes. Always a dramatic addition to a cover, we could probably compile fifty of these, at least, but here are twenty examples. The artists—Emilio Freix, Robert Maguire, James Hodges, and others—use them to greater and lesser degrees, and opt for both literal and stylized renderings. For instance, the above cover from Maguire shows vertical shadows, but the sense of venetian blinds remains. As always, thanks to all the original uploaders.

This great dust cover is by Barbara Walton, one of the best illustrators ever to take up a brush. She did most of her work in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and was quite prolific along with her equally talented sister, so we’ll be sure to get back to her a bit later. Charlotte Armstrong was an award winning mystery writer, the author of twenty-nine novels, and this one has a Shakespearean set-up as a young man decides that his father was murdered by his new stepfather. He has little evidence save for a cryptic note and a general belief that his mother should not have remarried as quickly as she did, so rather than go to the cops he plots his own brand of revenge. Problem is, he might be wrong in his basic assumption. The above hardback appeared in 1964 for the book’s British run, and the Ace paperback edition below is from a year earlier in 1963.

In 1894 a motion picture device called Mutoscope was invented. It worked by flipping a series of cards printed with still photographs. The cards featured slightly different versions of the same scene shot in sequence, and viewing them in rapid succession created a motion picture. Basically, the Mutoscope was an arcade attraction, and the films, viewed by one customer at a time through a peephole, often featured racy material. Much later, during the 1940s, a company called the International Mutoscope Reel Company began publishing what it called mutoscope cards. These were never meant to be used in actual Mutoscopes—instead they were cheaply printed pin-up paintings that people bought as novelties. We came across a set at an auction site recently, and so you see some here. These are collectible today because the artists were luminaries such as Earl Moran, Zoe Mozert, Billy Devorss and Gil Elvgren, and we have examples from those four and others below.