Bantam No. 105 (1947)

Title : Our Hearts Were Young and Gay
Author : Cornelia Otis Skinner
Cover art : S. B. (Boomey) Valentine
   [ N. Y. : Bantam, 1947. No. 105. "They invaded Europe" -- back cover.  Co-written with her friend Emily Kimbrough. Cover art by S. B. (Boomey) Valentine. Drawings by 'Alajalov.'  First published in hardcover, New York, Dodd, Mead & company, 1942. An early account of women traveling independently, Our Hearts is the story of two young women’s experiences traveling in France and especially Paris in the early 1920s.]

style ***

substance ***

collectibility **

  ''There is a noticeable trace of mild humor to Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, but it is very mild indeed, about as tasty as junket or cornstarch pudding. Why it should be a co-selection for December by the Book-of-the-Month Club is a dark mystery.'' -- Orville Prescott, review in the New York Times, 1942

  Cornelia Otis Skinner had an acting and literary background via her East Coast upper-class upbringing which included an Ivy League & Sorbonne education. In addition to acting for the screen and stage, she wrote extensively, with her credits including both fiction and nonfiction books, as well as pieces for the New Yorker. Film buffs remember her as the sinister quack psychiatrist Miss Holloway in the quasinoir ghost story The Uninvited [1].  

  But as for Bantam 105 . . .  that’s some cover! Two nattily dressed women stroll down a Paris boulevard. Love those hats! Cornelia must be the one on the right. Admirers include Adolphe Menjou lookalike and baker (tailor?), and how about sneaking in a dog in the design! Cover artist S. B (Boomey) Valentine is a new name to me, about whom very little information seems available, online or otherwise. The style here is fairly representative of Bantam’s early look which favored flat, cartoonish figures. But this cover simply has a lot more energy and texture than the usual Bantam offerings of the period. In particular the perspective, tone, sensibilities and mostly the colors scream FRANCE! 

  Our Hearts clearly overshadows all of Cornelia’s other creative endeavors, even her considerable acting career. How to explain its nearly universal good press today, given the quaint and dated sensibilities? To a large extent it must be the very innocents abroad quality that’s so engaging to our more jaundiced eyes and ears. Indeed Our Hearts was fairly light and frothy even for its time; it appeared only a few years after the Great War and just before the more edgy travel writing of the 1930s and 1940s. It also stands as a lighter contrast to the more somber fiction of the period which had a travel element.   


  Curiously - a bit a trivia that only a librarian could love - spot checks reveal that the book is invariably classified by libraries as fiction though the subject matter is clearly personal recollections of a nonfiction nature . . . such are the mysterious whys and wherefors of library catalogers.

  In any case Cornelia remains a fascinating character and, Orville Prescott's aforequoted dissent notwithstanding, Our Hearts ranks as her literary masterpiece and major creative contribution. 


   [1] This was a role with decidedly lesbian overtones, quite remarkable for the strait-laced Forties. Indeed viewed today from a seven decades distance, Cornelia’s brilliant performance leaves little doubt as to the character’s orientation*, and it’s a bit of a mystery that the film got past the censors. Which, in a roundabout way, brings us back to the present book, and we wonder if the ‘gay’ in the title refers to the term in the more contemporary sense (after all Our Hearts is the story is of two unattached women traveling together in the more open, less homophobic Twenties). But not the case -- the modern usage of the word didn’t take until 1965 or thereabouts, and thus the more prosaic explanation for the book's title is that it simply refers to the contents as being a lighthearted travel frolic**. 

A formidable character in The Uninvited
(with Gail Russell)

  * Her entrance is a master stroke of subtlety and suggestion -- she sits imperiously at her desk in the inner sanctum of the gloomy, dungeon-like ‘retreat center‘ which she presides over. A gigantic, Laura-esque portrait of the deceased Mary Meredith looms over the massive office, while Wagner, Tristan & Isolde no less (Love & Death indeed!), gently wafts nearby (this is a nice ambiguous touch since it’s not made clear whether the music is source or background). Her high priestess chic clothes, stilted manner of speech, and severe hairstyle establish her as an exotic, mysterious character with quasi-supernatural powers, who exerts an unlikely, and uncanny, in any case decidedly malevolent hold over the film’s nominal heroine Stella and - even more so, and even more surprising - Stella’s pathologically protective but otherwise no-nonsense grandfather. This is paralleled by the hold, from beyond the grave, which Mary Meredith has over Miss Holloway, further contributing to the forbidden, diseased eroticism which hovers, hothouse-like (after all, they’re always talking about the strong scent of mimosa!) throughout the film and in particular is associated with Miss Holloway's obsession with Mary, and which seems to spill over to the other characters.

  ** Although at least one source suggests a mildly lesbian subtext. 

Black Dog & Leventhal reissue, 2005

The Mysterious Press 0-445-40709-3 (1986)

Title : Seeds of Treason
Author : Ted Allbeury
Cover art : Rolf Erickson (design); Sonja Lamut, Nenad Jakessivic (illustration)

   [N. Y. : Mysterious Press, 1986. Published in hardcover by The Mysterious Press. First published in U.K. by New English Library.]

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Spy vs. spy

The cover of Mysterious Press’s paperbound reissue of Seeds of Treason is nothing special; it’s a pleasingly eye-catching design which gets right to the Cold War bonafides of the story (I just love all that red!). But what is most of interest in Seeds is the discovery of espionage writer Ted Allbeury. From all accounts he was a relatively major figure in the post Ian Fleming/Graham Greene era of spy fiction but alas largely forgotten today. 

In any case Seeds is a very late in the day Cold War thriller, conventional but supremely competent, with serviceable characters, a tight plot and well-textured settings. But most notable is Allbeury’s lovingly drawn, convincingly detailed accounts of the mechanics of the spy business in all their rather mundane le Carré-esque glory [1]. 

[1] And sometimes not so mundane, as in the intellectually exotic concept of stochastic processes which figures peripherally in the story. Author Allbeury came by his espionage expertise honestly and it shows; think Peter Wright’s Spycatcher as fiction and you get an idea of the general tone and content of Seeds of Treason.

New English Library hardcover edition

Site of the month

At Eisa Rolle’s LiveJournal page her Behind the Cover tag has some nice vintage era cover scans accompanied by richly detailed commentary .... the posts include lesser known cover artists like Ann Cantor and Denis McLoughlin.

The Gilded Man

Title : The Gilded Man
Author : Carter Dickson
Cover art : Nicky Zann
   [N. Y. : International Polygonics Ltd, 1989. Pseud. John Dickson Carr. (Library of Crime Classics). A Sir Henry Merrivale mystery. Cover art : Nicky Zann. First published in hardcover, N.Y., Morrow, 1942. Also issued as Death and the Gilded Man.]

style ***

substance **

collectibility *

Nicky Zann’s cover for the reissue of the Gilded Man must rank as one of the creepier examples of retro-vintage. International Polygonics did an entire series of classic mystery reprints in the late 1980s and early 1990s, most of them with quirky, offbeat covers, a number of them done by Nicky Zann. Unfortunately it seems that the company went out of business around 1995. However, their books are still very much available.

Pocket Books, 1947

Pan, 1961

Berkley, 1966

Chronicles of Nana

What is one to make of Pocket Books’ 1941 edition of Emile Zola’s Nana with its lurid cover of a torch singer in a transparent white dress? It’s back-cover blurb declared, “she squandered fortunes, ruined lives, with sublime contempt and abandon -- yet her disease-ridden days were spent in squalor and oblivion.” Is this art or trash?

   -- Paula Rabinowitz, Black & White & Noir : America’s Pulp Modernism, pp. 81-82.

  

Emile Zola’s classic novel Nana has been well served by the publishing industry [1]; even the most cursory glance at LibraryThing or Google Images reveals covers which likely number in the hundreds. Classic era vintage, modern, and all shadings in-between have gotten into the act, but for vintage pb buffs the sine qua non are the two, alas anonymous, ‘scandalous’ covers from the unlikely source of Pocket Books, which was usually conservative in its cover art. Both versions depict the title character in all her (more or less) unclothed glory. Which one is actually the more risqué cover is debatable. The 1945 printing is particularly effective with all those voyeuristic, tuxedoed silhouettes in the darkened theater. A nice creepy touch.

Anyway, perhaps the folks at Pocket thought better of the racy treatment and reverted to form in the 1954 Pocket Cardinal reissue, which is pretty tame in comparison. For that matter how about the incredibly bland treatment of Nana's Mother from the usually more daring Avon books? [2] And speaking of restrained, there are a couple of James Avati sketches (later used for Bantam 2811) posted by the redoubtable Piet Schreuders. While technically proficient they fall far short of the Pocket covers in sizzle.

[1] A good sampling of Zola covers can be found here. 

[2] Avon returns to lurid form, however, with Piping Hot, a (spurious?) Nana-esque title from the Zola oeuvre. 

Dell 896 (1954)

Title : The Butcher's Wife
Author : Owen Cameron
Cover art : William Rose
  [Cameron, Owen. The Butcher’s Wife. N. Y. : Dell Books, 1954. No. 896. Cover art : William Rose. First published, Simon & Schuster Inner Sanctum, 1954.] 


"Two lovely ladies on his mind, and two dead dames on his hands." – front cover.

style ***
substance **
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  I confess to not being familiar with author Cameron or cover artist William Rose.* Cameron apparently wrote some mystery novels in the 1950s set in California. For the Dell reprint of Butcher's Wife, cover artist Rose provides a knockout cover, quite an improvement over the rather bland hardcover original. The woman in the foreground is rendered in loving detail featuring peach and off-orange tints for her dress [which is nicely matched in the lettering], along with a pouting mouth and a defiant upturn of the head. The shadows in the background of a man carrying a [presumably] naked, dead woman, help to conjure up a sinister, macabre atmosphere. 


* A little research reveals artist Rose to be yet another of the 1950s unsung heroes of vintage cover design. His covers tend to be a synthesis of Mitchell Hooks-like expressionism and James Meese naturalism.   

Inner Sanctum, 1954

Site of the Month 2

  Pulp Curry. "Crime, hard-boiled and curried."
   Commentary on crime fiction and film which focuses on Asia and Australia. Maintained by Andrew Nette. Has a nice representation of Australian pulp covers from the 1950s and 1960s. One of my favorite posts is Executives behaving badly : sixties Australian pulp part 2.