Paperback 309: Yesterday's Love / James T. Farrell (Avon 260)

Paperback 309: Avon 260 (2nd ptg / 1st thus, 1950)

Title: Yesterday's Love
Author: James T. Farrell
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $17


Best things about this cover:

• You know what they say: "Yesterday's Love, Today's Floating Head"
• Marion celebrates her victory in the "Ornamented Boobs" contest by ordering up a pizza for her and the floating head of her recently deceased boyfriend: "Oh, and get extra anchovies. I can't taste for shit since I became incorporeal."
• "Yes, hello, Home Depot? My wallpaper seems to have grown a head. Also, it's astonishingly ugly. Can you help?"
• "Studs Lonigan" always struck me as a great porn name. "Long Studsigan" might be better, though perhaps too spot-on.

Best things about this back cover:

• Yes, I knew it. "Frankness!" I was just perusing this back cover going "come on, some form of the word 'frank.'" — "These stories will sear you with their frankness!" Then they will put you in the oven of "brutal awareness" and gently roast you until you are cooked through.
• Is James T. Farrell the reason so many writers and hipster affect a scroungey "I could give a fuck" look. This guy's got it down pat. He's like the original. "Hair-combing's for squares! Fuck ties! Where are my cigarettes?"

Page 123~

She went to Sonny. Harry looked at her with utter contempt. His eyes were full of hatred. He got up and turned on the radio. He could hear the child babbling and gaily talking to its mother as she washed him. He turned off the radio and sat there waiting until they would take their walk. Then they would eat their supper, see another moving picture, and come back to the hotel. [final paragraph of "The Sport of Kings"]

~RP

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Paperback 304: Seven / Carson McCullers (Bantam Giant A1235)

Paperback 304: Bantam Giant A1235 (1st ptg — unusually, labeled "First Edition" — 1954)

Title: Seven
Author: Carson McCullers
Cover artist: Mitchell Hooks

Yours for: $9

• ... in which an Amazon thrashes a little hunchback with a whip, a young Army private steals a heap of seatbelts from Abe Lincoln and Harry Truman, and Old Joe McGuffin asks Joey if he's ever been in a Turkish prison.
• Never was a big fan of the multi-scene cover — too much going on, all the art gets short shrift.

• "A fourth-dimensional quality" — so ... it's a book about time travel, then? Awesome.
• "... the tempestuous seas of human living" — yeesh, dial it back, Cap'n Foley.
• "Troubling of a Star" is a terrrrrrible title. Why not just call it "The Troubling Star" or "Star Trouble" or "Raiders of the Lost Ark" or something?
• New York TIMES (!) gives us perhaps the best one-word review of a book so far: "... ABLE"; that's not a review, that's a suffix.

Page 123~

The child repeated the words, and she repeated them with unbelieving terror. "The tooth tree!"

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

Paperback 38: Pyramid G-665

Paperback 38: Pyramid G-665 (PBO, 1961)

Title: The Ghoul Keepers
Editor: Leo Margulies
Cover artist: John Schoenherr

Yours for: $11


Best things about this cover:

• So red
• "I am the eye in the sky, / Looking at you -ou -ou, / I can read your mind..."
• What kind of title is The Ghoul Keepers? Is it supposed to be a pun on "Goal Keepers?" I hope there is at least one story in here about monsters who play soccer.
• There is nothing recognizable in this cover painting except the supremely miserable man (possibly bleeding from his eyeballs) who is about to impale himself on the spear-like branches.
• That man is clearly damned - he has been cursed with an obscenely long thumb on his right hand ... and an exoskeleton.
• "Seabury Quinn" is the most made-up-sounding name ever ever. Ever. Actually, it's just the "Seabury" part. Unless you are a racehorse, that is not an acceptable name.

This book is so beautiful. I wish you could see it in real life. Pristine. Unread. The kind of book collectors dream of. Several of the featured writers here are top-notch - the top three on the list, specifically. One of my students, whom I'll call Cindy Loo Hoo, is writing her Honors Thesis on short horror fiction. She will undoubtedly want to look at this book. But I am too neurotic a collector freak to let her actually read it.



Best things about this back cover:

• Here we see the man falling in the opposite direction. And in black-&-white. How interesting.
• I actually love the cheeky reference to "The Shadow" in the footnote.
• Answers to the quiz:

1. Mermen
2. Sasquatch
3. a vampire (trick question)
4. Caspar
5. that quiet guy next door
6. Betty & Veronica

RP

Paperback 30: Bantam F2817

Paperback 30: Bantam F2817 (1st ptg, 1965)

Title: 13 French Science-Fiction Stories
Editor: Damon Knight
Cover artist: Uncredited

Best things about this cover:

• I think I had a dream like this once.
• How can so much skin be so unsexy?
• "... when French l'amour meets science fiction" = "When French 'the love' meets science fiction" = corny and stupid.
• "It's the story of a voluptuous naked cat-woman who shoots a rocket out of the back of her head in order to keep a horde of flying sun-angels from stealing her newspaper, and the nearly nude one-armed bald chick in diaphanous tatters who turned her back on the whole ordeal."

Best things about this back cover:

• If the giant fonts here are to be believed, the French are known for two things: love and wackiness
• "From the land of Zola and Maupassant ..." - like it's some exotic, far-off world. I like that they chose the authors with the most science-fictiony-sounding names. Zola was a favorite of the mid-century paperback world because he had literary credibility but was also, you know, a little dirty. His paperback popularity in the 40s and 50s is actually pretty remarkable. I have many Zola works in my collection, many of them with lurid covers. The paperback industry could make just about anyone seem like a dirty writer if it wanted to.
• Why are the three lines in the middle of the page in different colors? Somebody really needed to keep a tighter rein on the design team here.
• "They gave the world Jules Verne" - perhaps the weirdest claim that's ever been made about the French. "Please, take Jules Verne. We no longer have any use for him."
• "Imaginative" spelled backwards is Evita Nigami
• Writing "Imaginative" backwards is not terribly imaginative
  

RP