Paperback 347: The Race of Giants / Matt Kinkaid (Dell First Ed. A118)

Paperback 347: Dell First Edition A118 (PBO, 1956)

Title: The Race of Giants
Author: Matt Kinkaid
Cover artist: Sam Bates

Yours for: $10


Best things about this cover:

• "... do you smell something funny? Hmm ... probably just my mustache. No, wait, my ass is on fire."
• Wow, he is a giant—keeps a herd of cattle in his back pocket.
• Love how he Fills the frame; also love the partial view of the horse. Not so keen on being able to see his long johns, but whatever.

Best things about this back cover:

• "Blood on his hands ... money on his mind!"
• Not the most realistic flames, but they are pretty.

Page 123~

Julius made a small sound of grim satisfaction. "Here comes the wagon."

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

Paperback 342: I Fear You Not / Ben Kerr (Popular Library 763)

Paperback 342: Popular Library 763 (PBO, 1956)

Title: I Fear You Not
Author: Ben Kerr (pseud. of William Ard)
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: Not For Sale

Best things about this cover:

• "C'mon, this is prime lady flesh. At $4.95 / lb. ... you're not gonna get a better price than that!"
• "Take My Wife... seriously, take her, she's drivin' me and my pal Barney here nuts!"
• "Hi, Steve? I'm just calling you from my bubble bath to tell you that I fear you not, OK? OK, bye."
• *He Bought Cops The Way He Bought Women ... With A Nice Dinner And A Little Sweet Talk*
• "Down I Go," HA ha.
• The exclamation point motif (continued, in spades, on the back cover) is Exquisite.

Best things about this back cover:

• Poor Rita: "Ok, I've got on a sweater, parka, overcoat, headscarf ... so how 'bout now?" "Nope, sorry, you still look naked." "Damn it!" "Maybe tweed will work. Try tweed."
• Poor Paul: It's hard to come out to your mom, on the phone, in the '50s.
• Poor Gloria: She just looks really, really stupid.

Page 123~

He watched dispassionately as her shadowy figure gathered up clothes and put them on. It was a lithe young figure, a pleasure to watch in motion, but its bloom was aborning."

Easy on the thesaurus work there, Yeats. "Aborning?!" As in "Your writing is 'aborning' me to tears?"

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

Paperback 320: Gunpoint! / John L. Shelley (Graphic 124)

Paperback 320: Graphic 124 (PBO, 1956)

Title: Gunpoint!
Author: John L. Shelley
Cover artist: Saul Levine

Yours for: $11


Best things about this cover:

• I love how excited the title is just to be alive! Exclamation point! And I *love* how the exclamation point is *so* excited that it's falling over.
• I also love how the shooter is making that great, wincey, western, "I'll get ye, ye rascally varmint" face.
• His partner has fallen in perhaps the most awkward position I've ever seen a dead body in on a paperback cover.
• Check out the interior title page — very cool:

And the back cover:


Best things about this back cover:

• "Let Sleeping Lawdogs Lie" is phenomenally lame. Is "lawdog" even a word?
• "Lived to kill ... killed to live ... wrong end of a rope ... right end of a gun" — somebody's been practicing his bad movie trailer patter.

Page 123~

Broady came to him, an ancient Sharps buffalo gun in the crook of his arm. His broad face split in a dusty grin and he patted the stock of the weapon.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

57 Books from the University Book Sale: Book 57

Title: Fightin' Fool (Pocket 2316, 5th ptg, 1956)
Author: Max Brand
Cover artist: Tom Ryan

Yours for: $7

• "Fightin' Fool!" — well, title, you're at least half right.
• Before the Tiger Woods fist pump, there was this.
• You gotta love this guy's enthusiasm. He hasn't even managed to get out of the manacles, and yet he's still super-psyched: "That's right, I got guns ... plural!"

• Best tag line in a long, long time. Jingo! It's like Jenga and Yahtzee rolled into one, and yet dangerous close to a racial slur at the same time. Edgy! I only wish it read, "Nobody plays Jingo, sucker!"
• This back cover copy is a random excerpt and tell us nothing about the story. Except that Jingo is kind of shooty.
  
• The last simile doesn't really work, in that getting your fingers into a glove can be awkward and would likely involve way more time than your enemy would need to drop you. You also need two hands to do it (unlike drawing and firing a sidearm ... assuming westerns haven't been lying to me all these years). I think the writer was thinking of the idiom of something's "fitting like a glove," and then just ... went off track.

Page 123~

Wheeler Bent was silent. He stared at the girl with half-closed eyes, for suddenly it came over him that Jingo was as like this girl as though he had been born her twin.

First, why are the girl's eyes half-closed? Second, "Wheeler Bent" indicates that Max Brand was awesome with names, and that Jingo was no fluke. Third, everything after "Jingo" in that second sentence is a stylistic disaster. We could start with the redundancy of "born" (how else can you be somebody's twin?) but by the time the sentence gets there, it's already an ungainly mess.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

57 Books from the University Book Sale: Book 51

Title: The Yellow Room (Dell D179, 1st thus, 1956)
Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
Cover artist: "Cover design by Push-Pin Studios"

Yours for: $6

• Who runs like that? She looks like she is either shouting "O lawdy lawdy" or preparing to throw a boomerang
• The world's only nonuplets furiously clean the walls of the "Hollywood Squares" set
• This book should have been called "Nine Yellow Rooms Which Are Actually Mostly Orange"

• I haven't laughed this hard at the tag line on a book's back cover in some time.
• After reading this back cover, it appears the tag line *should* have read "A Smell of Rancid Flesh"
• OK, at "... and something else," we know it's a dead body. I was holding out hope that the last word on the cover would be something like "squirrel," "gnome," or "Smurf," but no...

Page 123~

She protested almost wildly, but he did not listen.

What the hell does "almost wildly" look like? What am I supposed to be picturing, Mary? Ugh. Thank god there's just one more MRR book to go. Her writing is unbearable, even in tiny pieces.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

57 Books from the University Book Sale: Book 24

Title: Down to Eternity (Gold Medal s550, 1956)
Author: Richard O'Connor
Cover artist: I think that's Charles Binger's signature

Yours for: $5

• "Efxcuse me, sfir, you're pholding my head afwittle tight..."
• "Does this life jacket smell clean to you, Mary!? Well does it!? Whoa, is that an iceberg?"
• Next time you really want to annoy a woman, accuse her of riding the "P.M.S. Titanic" (that's what that life jacket says, right?)
• This book was reviewed in the New York Times (found this page trying to hunt down the date of this book, which appears to lack a proper title and publishing info page)

• Easy on the bloated hyperbole, junior.
• Oh, R.M.S. Titanic ... yeah, that makes more sense.

Page 123~

Still clad in his dressing gown, he bustled around the boat deck and undoubtedly made a great nuisance of himself.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

57 Books from the University Book Sale: Book 21

Title: Too Late the Phalarope (Signet S1290, 1956)
Author: Alan Paton
Cover artist: uncredited

Yours for: Whatever

• The "phalarope" is a wading bird, and not, as it sounds, a rope made out of penis.
• The background of this cover is an abstract horror show. Total fail.

• Well, N.Y. Herald Tribune, you were half right.
• Publishing imperative: do not, under any circumstances, mention "race" on the cover. "Instead of 'white,' why not try 'most respected'? And for 'black,' consider some version of 'forbidden.'"

Page 123~

And he would not eat in the sun, but in the house; and he would not eat at all, but drank many cups of coffee, and smoked the cigarettes. And again he said, what's the talk amongst the black people, Johannes? But the boy could tell him nothing of account.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

Paperback 209: The Opening Door / Helen Reilly (Dell 917)

Paperback 209: Dell 917 (1st ptg, 1956)
Title: The Opening Door
Author: Helen Reilly
Cover artist: Victor Kalin

Yours for: $7


Best things about this cover:

• Given how it's cut and hung, I'm surprised the door opens at all
• That lady makes for a very nice-looking corpse. Normally, I go for women who are more than 3 ft. tall, but in her case, I'll make an exception.
• I change my vote. The expression on her face says not "dead" but "drunk and happy about it."

Best things about this back cover:

• Whoa. What the ... see, I almost like this. Dramatic meltdown, in slo-motion. That, or she's doing her best Elvis/James Brown song-ending pose. The one big difference: I think both those guys had more than three fingers on their right hands.
• "Taint of murder" - oh, man, that's the worst kind of taint
• "The Knob Is Turning" - a. that should have been the title of this book, b. that's what she said.

Page 123~

Gerald was talking to Cicely Thwaight near a clump of palms. How he had - dwindled, Eve thought dispassionately.

But Thwaight! There's more!

~RP

Paperback 161: Amazing Stories (December, 1956)

Paperback 161: Amazing Stories (December, 1956)

• Contains: "A World of His Own" by Robert Silverberg and "Tracking Level" by Harlan Ellison
• Cover artist: Ed Valigursky

Yours for: $10


Best things about this cover:

• In the future, "Deal or No Deal" is a lot more interesting.
• I'm pretty sure those ladies were not born ladies - it's nice to see that, in the future, transsexual and transgendered people will have steady work as game show hostesses
• Man, that guy really wants to kill Howie Mandel. But then who doesn't?
• This picture does not make it appear as if "Women Were His Pawns." Unless he's forcing them to act out some adolescent fantasy of his - I guess that's possible

Best things about this back cover:

• I own one of these books!
• Never before has the word "ANY" looked so exciting
• If you don't look closely, you can almost miss the flying saucer mountain scape in the background
• Love the unnecessary quotation marks around "top drawer" - do not love the quotation marks that open with "Handsome ... and then never close. Spine-tingling!
• Ad copy always hyphenates "science-fiction," while the book covers themselves Never do. Eeeeerie.
• I love how specific they are about the amount I would normally be paying ... "$8.65, you say ... oh my."

Page 123~

[click image to enlarge]

• "Would you ... become a peeping tom?" - they really know their audience, I think
• The "Space Club" appears to be a kind of asexual personals section for the Nerdiest People On Earth.

~RP

Paperback 111: Stars in My Crown / Joe David Brown (Teen Age Book Club T45)

Paperback 111: Teen Age Book Club T45 (1st ptg, 1956)

Title: Stars in My Crown
Author: Joe David Brown
Cover artist: Gould K. Hulse, Jr. (I think ... he's credited with the "decorations" on the inside)

Yours for: $7


Best things about this cover:

• "I'm your new preacher and I aim to give my first sermon right here ... even if I am jaundiced and half-drunk. Or drunk and half-jaundiced. Or dronk and half-jundiced. Point is, I got me a 12-pound Bible and this here gun, so what I says goes. Now if I can just traverse this comically high door frame..." "That's a window, you moron!" "In the name of Jesus, you better shut up!"
• Seriously, who taught this artist perspective? A five-year-old surrealist with bad eyes?
• The colors are so ... life-like. If your life exists only in primary colors and whatever color that guy in the corner is.
• Our hero looks like a sickly, less charismatic Robert Mitchum.
• What is that thing protruding from the chin of the man in the SW corner? A growth? A pouch of some kind? I want to say "beard" but ... it's got oddly regularly molded ridges on the end...

Best things about this back cover:

• "Grandpa"
• Why isn't this book called "Death Stalks the Parish" - it's a bit Agatha Christie, but it's a hell of a lot better than the current title
• Teen Age Book Club: For Teen Agers who are too emaciated to read standing upright.

Page 123~

"They didn't have no lamps when Ah went to school," he said, "an' Ah reckon what was good enough for me is good enough for the chil'lun [... sic!] nowadays."

~RP

Paperback 73: H.M.S. Ulysses / Alistair MacLean (Perma Books M-4067)

Paperback 73: Perma Books M-4067 (1st ptg, 1956)

Title: H.M.S. Ulysses
Author: Alistair MacLean
Cover artist: Robert Schulz


Best things about this cover:

• Ulysses decides he is tired of taking shit from the Harpies
• Awesomely unattributed blurb! - "Certainly the best novel of World War II at sea ... said this guy I heard mumbling to himself in the bookstore once."
• Robert Schulz is a great, great cover artist - one of the five best that ever lived, IMOO. His stuff is always very dramatic and naturalistic. We'll see a lot more from him.

RP

Paperback 55: The Luciano Story / Sid Feder and Joachim Joesten (Popular Giant G155)

Paperback 55: Popular Giant G155 (1st ptg, 1956)

Title: The Luciano Story
Author: Sid Feder and Joachim Joesten
Cover artist: N/A


Best things about this cover:

• "Ripped from the headlines ... literally! Ripped! Look at the jagged edges!"
• Extra! Extra! Extra!, this cover blows.

Best things about this back cover:

• Now we're talking: "Hi, I'm Lucky. I like booze. And cigarettes. And probably dames."
• "Underworld Overlord" - looks like some copywriter is bucking for a promotion!
• "In breezy journalese..." - I didn't know "journalese" could be "breezy." Does the Buffalo Courier-Express know that "journalese" is characterized by (and I quote) "clichés, sensationalism, and triteness of thought"?
• Speaking of "hack" writing, I dare you to "hack" your way through that first sentence. I mean, just try saying it out loud and see if you have any @#$#-ing idea what the author is trying to say.

RP

Paperback 35: Perma Books M-3036

Paperback 35: Perma Books M-3036 (1st ptg, 1956)

Title: Visa to Death
Author: Ed Lacy
Cover artist: Robert Maguire


Best things about this cover:

• Original title = "The Best That Ever Did It" - not sure "Visa to Death" is much of an upgrade
• I like when cover copy sounds exciting, but, on a literal level, actually makes no sense
• Is that a gun or a trick lighter?
• Fedora McTrenchcoat and Drunky Shirtsleeves are perfect meat for the sideways-glancing red-mouth twins
• Visa-face looks like he's got "Photograph of beaver" written over his head

I hope you can tell from the many covers you've seen so far that, whatever this cover's faults (and there are several), this artist is a master. Robert Maguire is the Caravaggio of paperback cover artists. His people - their faces in particular - seem to be alive, seem to suffer (however melodramatically). Now it's true that the women here seem to be sharing one face between them, so maybe there's not the range or variety one would hope for, but still; I find the artistry here a clear cut above the average covers we've been seeing. Incredibly fine detail combined with a suppleness that makes the whole shebang (even this crowded, oddly-laid-out shebang) very visually compelling.


Best things about this back cover:

• Can we call it a "Floating Head" if it's got no scene or landscape or hapless soul to "float" over? Judges say ... yes.
• Nice justaposition of "Double" and "Single" (here, nice = stupid)
• "Whistle up the murderer"? - Like "[whistle], come here, murderer!" Or "[whistle], lookin' good, murderer!" ???

RP

Paperback 21: Graphic Giant G-216

Paperback 21: Graphic Giant G-216 (1st Graphic ptg, 1956)

Title: The Private Life of Helen of Troy
Author: John Erskine
Cover artist: Unknown :(

Yours for: $8

Best things about this cover:

• This is one of the worst cover paintings - in terms of pure artistic quality - that I've ever seen. Mucky, awkward, poor in detail. Just a mess. And yet...
• Nice rack. Seriously. Her bangs are terrible, but her boobs ... are not. There is another, earlier version of this same book (which I own) that is famous for its "nipple cover" - but you'll have to wait for that one.
• If the background is to be believed, Troy was destroyed by a nuclear holocaust of some kind
• This is a wraparound cover, where the painting continues onto the spine and then the back of the book...

Best thing about this back cover:

• First word: GAY!
• Boats make every cover better
• If I'm counting correctly, there are a total of 4 Helens on this book's front and back covers. That is almost certainly a record for appearances of one character on a single cover

RP

Paperback 15: Gold Medal 605

Paperback 15: Gold Medal 605 (PBO, 1956)

Title: Dead - and Kicking
Author: Frank Castle
Cover artist: Mitchell Hooks

Yours for: $12

Best things about this cover:

• My eyes! If that skirt's stripes were any color other than gray, I think I'd be having seizures right about now.
• Gray-striped skirt over gray-striped skirt against scribbly ochre background and scribbly gray background. This is one of the most deliberately ugly covers ever (and Mitchell Hooks is a fabulous cover artist, so I have no idea what happened here)
• "Francy" appears to be having a stroke (her right hand!). Wait, which one's "Francy?" The big woman or the small, dead one? Are those supposed to be the same woman? I'd ask that guy in the middle there with the gun and the guilty expression, but he seems anxious to get somewhere.
• Hmm, I'm not familiar with that use of the verb "bloomed" ...
• Red heels. No victim's outfit is complete without them.

Best things about this back cover:

• Correct use of "whom" in penultimate paragraph
• "Desperately enough to comb California for her" - wow, that is desperate
• Apparently in the 50's, plastic surgery had not yet been done on anything but the nose; that, or her body was magically resistant to physical manipulation of any kind: "nothing on earth could alter a single curve of that wonderful body of her..." Really, not even, I don't know, a chainsaw? A year's supply of french fries? Nothing?
• Did that dude shoot himself? His gun is smoking, but he's lurching backward like he's been hit.
• Beware the giant floating head of Francy!

RP