Paperback 266: Hill Girl / Charles Williams (Gold Medal 141)

Paperback 266: Gold Medal 141 (PBO, 1951)

Title: Hill Girl
Author: Charles Williams
Cover artist: Barye Phillips

Yours for: $20


Best things about this cover:

• This is my nominee for "Most Phallic Gun Ever"
• "Maybe if I just sidle along this wall *very* slowly, that yokel standing four feet in front of me won't see me ..."
• Tori Spelling is ... Hill Girl!
• Guy in background: "Excuse me, I was just On The Road and I was wondering if ... oh, I see you're having some kind of altercation or mating ritual ... I'll just move along."
• This book is credited as "the first original paperback" by Jim Silke (Dames, Dolls & Gun Molls: The Art of Robert A. Maguire). But ... there are 40 Gold Medal pbs published before this one, almost all of them paperback originals (as far as I can tell). So ... I was confused by the claim. Maybe it's the first paperback to say, on the cover, "an original novel — not a reprint"? The wikipedia entry for "Gold Medal" confirms that it was publishing original paperbacks in 1950.
• Here's a nice write-up of Charles Williams by Bill Crider.

Best things about this back cover:

• I like back cover copy that gets right to the point.
• Who is "I" in this scenario?

Page 123~

The flowers were there in the room when we came in. She put her arms around my neck and pulled down hard, with the way she had, like a drowning swimmer, and with her lips against my ear she whispered fiercely, "Hold me tight like this, Bob. Don't ever let me go." [end of chapter]

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

Paperback 187: Cabin Road / John Faulkner (Gold Medal 178)

Paperback 187: Gold Medal 178 (PBO, 1951)
Title: Cabin Road
Author: John Faulkner
Cover artist: Barye Phillips

Yours for: $12


Best things about this cover:

• "If you loved William, then it's within the realm of possibility that you might not hate ... John Faulkner!"
• Erskine Caldwell paperbacks sold by the bushel, and they invariably featured unspeakably hot hillbilly women who had all their teeth. I guess the idea was that the poor were "earthy" (i.e. liked to do it). So there is a kind of post-"Tobacco Road" vogue in backwoods babery that you can see in a number of 1950s paperbacks.
• Can a hillbilly be "ribald?"
• This woman is a mess from the neck up. It's like someone photoshopped her head on wrong. Or broke her neck, waited for rigor mortis to set in, and then propped her up there.

Best things about this back cover:

• Uh, nothing
• Again with the "ribald"
• See, I told you - "Tobacco Road"-ishness was clearly the selling point here
• Steinbeck? *William* Faulkner? OK, now you're pushing it
• "Earthy" "Ribald" "Lusty" ... "female problems"!? Does that mean the same thing it means now? Hey, what does it mean now? Wasn't that the name of a movie starring Divine?

Page 123~

"I don't see nothing to want to stand over there about," George said. "Hit looks like to me the floor's about the same as it is where at you're standing, what of it you can see fer them dogs. Ain't you comfortable there?"

I'm ... going to need a translator.

~RP