Pulp International - cover+collection

Jun 1 2023

In pulp you're always on the wrong side of the tracks.

We're train travelers. We love going places by that method. It's one of the perks of living in Europe. Therefore we have another cover collection for you today, one we've had in mind for a while. Many pulp and genre novels prominently feature trains. Normal people see them as romantic, but authors see their sinister flipside. Secrets, seclusion, and an inability to escape can be what trains are about. Above and below we've put together a small sampling of covers along those lines. If we desired, we could create a similar collection of magazine train covers that easily would total more than a hundred scans. There were such publications as Railroad Stories, Railroad Man's Magazine, Railroad, and all were published for years. But we're interested, as usual, in book covers. Apart from those here, we've already posted other train covers at this link, this one, this one, and this one. Safe travels.

Vintage Pulp

Apr 26 2023

Lines in the sand have a way of getting crossed.

Considering our website's focus on beautiful art, you must be asking how we came to read Stanley Ellin's 1970 novel The Bind, with its beige post-GGA cover treatment by Joe Lombadero. What happened was we decided to watch the 1979 Farrah Fawcett movie Sunburn, but stopped during the opening credits when we saw that it was based on a novel. We'd decided to see the movie because it was helmed by cult director Richard C. Sarafian, and also because its premise interested us, but we figured that premise was probably more fully and interestingly developed in the source novel. We won't know for sure until we watch the film, but it's pretty much a given when you compare literature to cinema.

Here's the premise: insurance investigator Jake Dekker needs to get close to a secretive family to disprove a verdict of accidental death and save his employers a $200,000 payout, so he rents a house in their tony Miami enclave and hires an actress to pose as his wife. The family would be suspicious of a single man, but not a married couple. He's carried out similar scams and worked with the same actress over and over, but when she can't make the gig she instead sends down-on-her-luck colleague Elinor Majeski as a replacement. The fake wife aspect of Jake's scheme immediately gets complicated, both because this new actress is smarter and more curious than is convenient, and because she's unusually lovely. Uh oh. Professional comportment—out the window.

Ellin pushes his ripe premise for all it's worth. Jake insists on realism, which involves he and Elinor getting comfortable around each other, whatever intimate circumstances might arise. The only line they aren't to cross is sleeping in the same bed. Heh. How long do you think that lasts? Actually, it lasts a long while. Jake's shell is hard. He's borderline mean to Elinor, and therein lies the balancing act in the narrative. He's mean, but occasionally charming. Ellin's writing treads that crucial line well, but the book is overlong and its climax goes in a direction we didn't like. But we'd read him again. In any case, now we'll have to see what the filmmakers did with Farrah in the role of Elinor. Charles Grodin co-stars, so we expect the movie to be a bit silly, but who can resist Farrah?

Florida Miami Random House Sunburn Stanley Ellin Farrah Fawcett Charles Grodin Joe Lombadero Richard C. Sarafian cover art literature cover collection

Vintage Pulp

Apr 1 2023

Mid-century paperback artists were in tune with the times.

There are numerous jazz themed mid-century paperback covers. The jazz milieu—with its smoky clubs, passionate personalities, and idiosyncratic ways—fascinated readers. Above you see a small collection of fronts that visually reference the uniquely American (black American) art of jazz. We've also added a couple of the many torch singer and crooner covers out there that seem jazzy enough to fit. The artists are Barye Phillips, Stanley Zuckerberg, Harry Barton, Mitchell Hooks, Julian Paul, and others. We've previously posted quite a few jazz covers, and we have a few jazz themed books still to read, so in both cases you won't see those pieces here. We don't keyword for jazz, which means a search for those we've already posted would bring up a welter of books, movies, tabloids, and album covers. Therefore, in order to save you the trouble of wading through all that, here are some links. We'll limit ourselves to ten: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Vintage Pulp

Feb 17 2023

Hammett plants a bumper crop of betrayal and murder.

We've already shown you John Vernon's and Lou Marchetti's artistic takes on Dashiell Hammett's seminal debut novel Red Harvest. Above you see another top artist running with Hammett's inspiration—Harry Bennett. This appeared on the cover of the 1961 Perma Books edition, with Bennett taking a less representational route than Vernon or Marchetti. We especially like mottled brushwork inside the red border. You may have thought that was damage to the book, but it's in the art alright. It fits what is an incredibly blood soaked tale. Bennett was tapped by Perma for a series of Hammett covers, which he painted in similar style, including unusual border work on those too. We've added those below. To see everything we have from him, click his keywords at bottom.

Perma Books Dashiell Hammett Harry Bennett cover art cover collection literature

Vintage Pulp

Jul 21 2022

For a fulfilling killing nothing beats a blade.

Today we have for your pleasure a collection of vintage paperback covers featuring characters on both the giving and receiving ends of knives—or knifelike tools such as icepicks. Above you see Harry Bennett art of a poor fella getting a knife from nowhere. Maybe Damocles did it. It's a funny cover because we don't think we'd grab our throats if we got stabbed in the spine, but let's hope we never find out. Below, in addition to numerous U.S. and British offerings, you'll see covers from France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. There are many, many paperback fronts featuring knives—we mean hundreds—but we decided to stop ourselves at thirty-two today. These do not represent the best (as if we could decide something like that), or our favorites, but merely some interesting ones we've come across of late. If you're super interested in this particular motif we have plenty more examples in the archives. They'd be hard to find, because we don't keyword for knives, so here are some links to get you there: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Vintage Pulp

Feb 18 2022

I'm not only beautiful. I'm expensive, inconvenient, and unreliable. You'll spend years explaining all this to your therapist.

We have another paperback collection for you today, and this one is a no-brainer for a pulp site. There are hundreds of covers featuring women in bars, many of which we've already shared, such as here, here (scroll down), and here. Above and below are more, and as soon as we uploaded them we went to do exactly what the art depicts. Have a happy Friday, everyone.

Vintage Pulp

Feb 6 2022

We always have space for Giovanni.

Benvenuti is an Italian word that means “welcome,” and an artist who's always welcome here is Giovanni Benvenuti, a genius we've featured several times. But it's been a while so we've put together another collection of his work below.

Italy France Éditions Ditis Garzanti Giovanni Benvenuti Anthony Morton Bruno Bax Jean Pierre Ferrière Michel Averlant Manning Long Stuart Palmer Mickey Spillane John Creasey D. Miles Disney cover art cover collection literature

Vintage Pulp

Dec 9 2021

It's a carnaval of mayhem in Brazil.

We wanted to call attention one last time to an interesting Facebook page dedicated to vintage crime paperbacks published in Brazil by Edições de Ouro and Editora Tecnoprint. We started our webpage in 2008 and back then we had a lot of company. Somehow or other, regretfully, we've outlasted many of them. Maybe in the age of Twitter and Instagram, blogs with actual words have died. But for that reason it's exciting to see someone launch something new—especially dedicated to such an exotic (from our point of view) niche of paperback style. It was actually launched in 2017, but we saw it only recently. We can tell you this—we love Brazil, have been there for carnaval, and if we'd known these books were down there we'd have brought back more than just a long lasting cachaça hangover. We knew Brazil had produced some pulp style paperbacks—much of the art was repurposed from U.S. editions—but we didn't know it was this extensive. Carnaval 2022? Well, probably not. But one day, return we will, to old Brazil.

Brazil Tecnoprint Edições de Ouro e Editora Tecnoprint Bruno Fischer Wade Miller William Ard Frank Kane Rex Stout Brett Halliday Stephen J. Marlowe cover art cover collection literature

Vintage Pulp

Sep 19 2021

Into battle, me mateys! And tonight for those who survive—extra portions of organic Chai tea!

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, not an official holiday, sadly. We asked the Pulp Intl. girlfriends what they'd do if they were pirates and the answers weren't pretty. Making all the men walk the plank was the most charitable of their thoughts, with swords and whips coming into play pretty quickly after that. Good thing we're only supposed to talk like pirates. Arrr... let's tone down the homicidal thoughts, girls.

Above and below is a collection of vintage paperbacks with women pirates. Well, maybe the woman on the cover of Rafael Sabatini's The Fortunes of Captain Blood isn't a pirate so much as someone defending herself. But anyone who can handle two pistols at once is an honorary pirate, at the least. We found eleven examples, and the cover art on display is by Harry Schaare, Rudolph Belarski, Barye Phillips, Paul Anna Soik, and others.

Frank Shay Gardner F. Fox Philip Rush Robert E. Howard Jeramie Price Douglas Brown Raafael Sabatini Inglis Fletcher Frank G. Slaughter C.V. Terry Adam Shaw Harry Schaare Rudolph Belarski Barye Phillips Paul Anna Soik cover art cover collection literature

Vintage Pulp

Aug 10 2021

Filled with great flavor and extra pulp.

Above: a small collection of Benedetto Caroselli covers on which he utilized orange. We put this group together because last week's poster for Le trottoir made us realize we rarely see predominantly orange book covers, then it occurred to us that Caroselli was one illustrator who used the color often. He painted ten of these for Edizioni Periodici Italiani's collection I Capolavori della Serie KKK Classici dell’Orrore, and two for EPI's Agente Segreto series. You can see Caroselli squeeze another cover out of orange here.

Note: We put this collection together yesterday. Today a new monitor we ordered arrived and some of the colors that were solidly orange now look, well, red-orange. But you know what? Fuck it.