Paperback 296: The Dreadful Night / Ben Ames Williams (Popular Library 155)

Paperback 296: Popular Library 155 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: The Dreadful Night
Author: Ben Ames Williams
Cover artist: Rudolph Belarski

Yours for: $16


Best things about this cover:

• "Hello, police, I'm being pursued by ... hello? ... damn, this isn't my phone!"
• Rudolph Belarski: Master of DramaticHands (TM)
• That look is not fear. It is sadistic glee. And the man with the hands is not coming after her. He's about to keel over backwards. See, she has just plucked his heart from his chest with one vicious, kungfu strike. "Ha, take that, you bastard! Hey, I can hear the ocean in this thing..."
• "A Novel of Love, Hate and Death" — yep, that pretty much covers it.
• That's some structured swimwear, that is.
• Why is she at the seashore during a thunderstorm?

Best things about this back cover:

• Text me!
• "Adah Capello!" — no offense to all the ADAHs out there, but come on!
• God, these Popular Library back cover write-ups are dreadful. It's like a 9-yr-old kind of sort of recounting what happens in a book he's just read.

Page 123~

Marco the dog was there [I want to stop the quote right there], swimming this way and that, barking incessantly in a frenzied and pitiful fashion; behind his head a wide ripple spread as he quested to and fro..."

Uh ... "quested?" Is he a knight-dog?

~RP

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Paperback 142: Liana / Martha Gellhorn (Popular Library 529)

Paperback 142: Popular Library 529 (1st ptg, 1953)

Title: Liana
Author: Martha Gellhorn
Cover aritst: That guy who did all the Popular Library covers (i.e. I don't know)

Yours for: NOT FOR SALE


Best things about this cover:

• Note the censored (excised with scissors!) tagline - it should read: "Her Color Was No Barrier - To Men." I guess we're supposed to believe that that thing in red trunks is a man and not an oddly anthropomorphic lizard.
• "Are you done with your one-armed water chin-ups yet? My neck is getting tired."
• Martha Gellhorn was married to Ernest Hemingway. She was a writer and journalist of some note. I have no idea how she came to be responsible for whatever this book is.

Best things about this back cover:

• OK, this is officially the gayest not-explicitly-gay paperback I have blogged about to date. It wants you to think it's all about her, but the pictures say otherwise. It's beefcake central up in here. All the boy/girl interaction here feels forced and sexless.
  
• "Hey, Johnny Handsome, your broad, muscular back and impossibly toned ass are blocking my view of the lady!"
• "Now I'm going to show you what women's breasts look like, Johnny." Johnny backs away in discomfort ... while still managing to give us yet another view of his rippling delts and obliques.
• Her dress appears to zip down the front (!?) past her crotch (!!?)
  
• "... a realistic analysis of a woman's degradation" - Nothing sells books like a realistic analysis of degradation, boy howdy. It should have its own section of the bookstore.
  
• "Frankness!" - that means there's sex. Yee haw!

Page 123~

Liana sent the servants home early that night and they were glad to go. They would feel safer in their own flimsy homes with their own people.

Silly natives and their love of straw huts!

~RP