Vintage Pulp Mar 30 2024
WAY INAPPROPRIATE
That's a tempting invitation, but the hospital has a very strict code of ethics. So we'll have to do it at your place.


Above: a Harry Barton cover for Stuart Friedman's 1960 sleazer The Way We Love, an “unconventional novels of manners and morals in a modern hospital.” Uh huh. We bet we know what's unconventional about it. Something of note here: the cover for Friedman's 1962 effort The Surgeons is a near-duplicate of this, but painted by Harry Schaare. We wonder if that's chance, or if Monarch's art director influenced the final product. Curious. We have a lot more medical covers in the website. See a small portion of them here, here, here, here, here, and here

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Vintage Pulp Mar 26 2024
CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC
Thank you very much. Next I'd like to massacre a song by Joan Baez.

Since we took a look at Barbara Walton's cover work recently we thought we'd circle back to her with an effort for John D. MacDonald's I Could Go On Singing, originally published in 1963 with this Robert Hale Ltd. hardback coming in ’64. This is very different, very minimalist work from Walton compared to what we showed you last time, but it just demonstrates her broad range. It's different work for pop fiction icon MacDonald too, as it was a novelization for a 1963 movie of the same name. Hey, whatever pays the bills. We didn't read it, but we gather that he managed to put his unique stamp on it. 

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Vintage Pulp Mar 23 2024
JOAN THE CLUB
A cover collection to help Bofill your day.


Below: a small set from Spanish artist Joan Beltrán Bofill, who signed his work as “Noiquet,” here working for a pair of Rotterdam based publishers illustrating novels by Edward Multon, who was an alter ego of Dutch author Herman Nicolaas van der Voort. These are from 1967 and 1968.

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Vintage Pulp Mar 22 2024
BEYOND A REASONABLE DEBT
This ain't Happy Days and he ain't the Fonz.


Since reading William R. Cox's 1961 thriller Death Comes Early we'd been looking around for more from him and located 1958's Hell To Pay, which you see above with a Robert Schulz cover. Cox writes in that same cool style we noted before, as he combines two crime sub-genres—organized crime, and juvenile delinquency. His main character Tom Kincaid is a successful NYC gambler who gets swept up in a mafia takeover centered around crooked boxing. Kincaid is thought by a kingpin named Mosski to be working for an upstart mob, which essentially makes this a find-the-real-killer novel in the sense that if Kincaid can't prove he isn't setting up Mosski his ass is grass. The book has in abundance generation gap musings, shady mingling between criminals and cops, poker described in hand-by-hand detail, and a lot of shooting and/or brutal beatings. Cox provides several good secondary characters, particularly Kincaid's been-around-the-block girlfriend Jean Harper. She's flawed, but then so is everyone here. There's a sequel to Hell To Pay, and we're onto that already.
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Vintage Pulp Mar 17 2024
COLOMBIAN GOLD
Maybe if we were high we'd have bought it.


We ran across this on mercadolibre.com. It's Ian Fleming's Goldfinger from Ediciones Albon, out of Colombia, published in 1964. The vendor was asking 200 for this. Pesos? No—dollars. That's a lot of plata. We'd rather spend the money on actual Colombian gold, so we took a pass. But we love the cover. 

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Vintage Pulp Mar 16 2024
THE WOMAN KING
She could be Ursula Andress.


Above: one of many covers for H. Rider Haggard's all-time classic She, aka She: A History of Adventure, about the cruel, beautiful, and powerful ruler of a lost world. We chose this one because the art is based on the 1965 movie adaptation starring Ursula Andress, as you can discern at a glance. And if not, we added an Andress shot below from the film for comparison's sake. You wouldn't quite call this paperback edition from London based Hodder & Stoughton a tie-in—the movie came out in 1965 in Britain, whereas the paperback is from 1968. But Andress never goes out of style. You could probably put her on a book cover now and it would sell like potato chips. We're going to screen her version of She in a bit, and report back. We already checked out one of the other dozen versions, 1935's effort starring Helen Gahagan, which you can read about here if you're curious.

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Vintage Pulp Mar 7 2024
SAFETY FIRST
She never has unprotected sex.

Above: an alternate cover for Milton K. Ozaki's 1952 thriller The Deadly Pick-Up. We use “thriller” loosely, because it wasn't a very involving book. But both covers are excellent. This one is by Rudy Nappi. You can see the other, by an uncredited artist, here

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Vintage Pulp Mar 5 2024
COLD HARD KASHMIR
British adventurers get high in South Asia.


The cover you see above for Berkely Mather's, aka John Evan Weston-Davies', 1960 adventure The Pass Beyond Kashmir is one of the more pleasing we've come across. It's by Barbara Walton, a preeminent dust sleeve illustrator from the 1950s until around 2000. We've featured her a few times, such as here, here, and here, and this effort maintains her incredibly high standard. The scene depicted makes one think there's a major romantic subplot in the novel, but the love interest is in the book for maybe twenty pages. It isn't Walton's fault that the art gave us expectations that weren't met. It happens with covers sometimes. No romantic adventure here.

The story actually revolves around a sardonic and extremely determined ex-intelligence operative named Idwal Rees who gets caught up in a search for missing documents in the Himalayas that might reveal the location of an oil discovery. The action takes the form of a quest from Bombay-Mumbai into the high mountains, with new difficulties encountered in each stop by he and partner Smedley, servant Safaraz, and reluctant informer Poison. Each obstacle is followed by desperate problem solving, and hairsbreadth escapes. The aforementioned sort-of love interest, a nurse named Claire Culverton, is mainly a source of consternation for Rees and a focus for his chauvinism.

The set-up and framework are fine, but we felt that the book got bogged down with too much local color. Obviously, authors wish to impart that they've at a minimum done their homework, and at a maximum lived some version of what they're writing about, but there's also such a thing as narrative flow. We get it—Mather was really in India and Pakistan. He even served in the army there. But in our opinion he needed another pass from an editor to make for a better book. Still, as it resolved, it was decent, though anyone of Indian, Pakistani, or Chinese descent—or of good conscience—will bristle at the treatment meted out by Rees and other Brits. But you know that going in, right?

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Vintage Pulp Mar 2 2024
HORSING AROUND
Wheeeee! Nothing compares to a butt-naked bareback ride on the beach! Not sex! Not money! Not anything!

Robert Bonfils did well with this wild cover for T.A. Maschke's 1961 sleazer Sex Is Like Money. His art convinced us to give the book a shot (literaure buffs may notice, by the way, that this title predates John Updike's famous quip from his 1968 book Couples). Maschke tells the story of a Chicago cab driver and former pro wrestler named Mike Turner, who's asked by a mystery woman named Della to swim eight-hundred yards into Lake Michigan and back to retrieve a briefcase of dirty financial records she intends to toss off a yacht and give to tax authorities. Turner wants to get laid, so he goes along with the plan, manages to return to shore with the briefcase, but soon learns that it contains not documents but a million dollars. Oops—duped!

The money belongs to Chi-Town crime kingpin Killer Canasta, and obviously he'll be furious—the guy is known as Killer, after all—so Della plans to flee to South America. She's willing to take Turner along, but he drags his feet, arguing instead that they should give the money to the feds and collect a reward. Dumb, right? Turner then discovers Della has an identical twin sister named Ella and things get weird. The tale eventually ends with a televised wrestling match in Soldier Field between Turner and Canasta. How does Maschke manage to bend the narrative toward that bizarre conclusion? It doesn't matter, because under no circumstances should you read Sex Is Like Money. And you always take our advice, right? Trust us this time—it's terrible. And on we go to the next... 

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Vintage Pulp Mar 1 2024
HIGHER INTELLIGENCE
How does an angel get its wings? Via cleverly repurposed cover art.


European and Australian publishers made a habit of reusing U.S. paperback art, and you see another example above. The top piece for John D. MacDonald's 1963 novel On the Run received a remix on the front of 1968's Een “kick” voor Erica, which is a translation by Dutch publishers Combinatie of Stephen Marlowe's 1967 novel Drumbeat — Erica. It's hard to improve on a McGinnis, but we think the fantasy-like transformation and giant wings—dare we say?—elevate cover number one to something even nicer. We found both on Flickr, so thanks to those two uploaders. 

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History Rewind
The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
May 11
1960—Adolf Eichmann Is Captured
In Buenos Aires, Argentina, four Israeli Mossad agents abduct fugitive Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who had been living under the assumed name and working for Mercedes-Benz. Eichman is taken to Israel to face trial on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war crimes. He is found guilty and executed by hanging in 1962, and is the only person to have been executed in Israel on conviction by a civilian court.
2010—Last Ziegfeld Follies Girl Dies
Doris Eaton Travis, who was the last surviving Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl, dies at age 106. The Ziegfeld Follies were a series of elaborate theatrical productions on Broadway in New York City from 1907 through 1931. Inspired by the Folies Bergères of Paris, they enjoyed a successful run on Broadway, became a radio program in 1932 and 1936, and were adapted into a musical motion picture in 1946 starring Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, and Lena Horne.
May 10
1924—Hoover Becomes FBI Director
In the U.S., J. Edgar Hoover is appointed director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a position he retains until his death in 1972. Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency, and with instituting a number of modern innovations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. But he also used the agency to grind a number of personal axes and far exceeded its legal mandate to amass secret files on political and civil rights leaders. Because of his abuses, FBI directors are now limited to 10-year terms.
1977—Joan Crawford Dies
American actress Joan Crawford, who began her show business career as a dancer in traveling theatrical companies, but soon became one of Hollywood's most prominent movie stars and one of the highest paid women in the United States, dies of a heart attack at her New York City apartment while ill with pancreatic cancer.
May 09
1949—Rainier Becomes Prince of Monaco
In Monaco, upon upon the death of Prince Louis II, twenty-six year old Rainier Louis Henri Maxence Bertrand Grimaldi, aka Rainier III, is crowned Prince of Monaco. Rainier later becomes an international household name by marrying American cinema sweetheart Grace Kelly in 1956.
1950—Dianetics is Published
After having told a gathering of science fiction writers two years earlier that the best way to become a millionaire was to start a new religion, American author L. Ron Hubbard publishes Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. The book is today one of the canonical texts of Scientology, referred to as "Book One", and its publication date serves as the first day of the Scientology calendar, making today the beginning of year 52 AD (After Dianetics).
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