Paperback 687: The Way of All Flesh / Samuel Butler (Pocket Books 8)

Paperback 687: Pocket Books 8 (3rd ptg, 1939)

Title: The Way of All Flesh
Author: Samuel Butler
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $21


Best things about this cover:

• "What're *you* lookin' at?"
• Her stockings are nuts. Horizontal red stripes? When was that a thing?
• This is the most pristine early Pocket Book I own—from the first year of the mass market paperback industry's existence. There are two signifiant scuff marks on the spine edge, but otherwise, it's shockingly pristine. Permagloss intact and everything. Trust me when I say 1939 paperbacks are rarely found in this state anymore.

Best things about this back cover:

• That Shaw quote is one of the best things I've ever seen printed on a back cover. The literary equivalent of "this is why we can't have nice things."
• "Now Ready." It's so adorable how *new* the paperback was at this point. 

Page 123~

One would have thought she had sowed enough of such religious wild oats by this time, but she had plenty still to sow.

"Religious wild oats" is not a phrase I ever expected to see.

~RP

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Paperback 412: The Physiology of Sex / Kenneth Walker (Penguin 507)

Paperback 412: Penguin 507 (3rd ptg, 1943)

Title: The Physiology of Sex
Author: Kenneth Walker
Cover artist: none

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• This was printed during that short period when Puritans ran Penguin and demanded that all images besides the logo be expunged from the covers.
• This gives me sex just the way I like it: sound and unflinching. And with penguins nearby.
• Pre-Kinsey guide to being normal... oh dear lord, I opened to a random page (106, to be exact) and found this gem: "So far the emphasis has been placed on the man's responsibility in coitus, since it falls to him to waken his wife's latent sexuality." Honestly, how did anyone survive the '40s? (I'm guessing by fucking instead of reading about fucking)

Best things about this back cover:

• Just Bernard? Not George Bernard? Why not just go all the way and call him "Bernie?"
• Penguins say num num num to the number "520"

Page 123~

If the stock be good and the family free from all such inheritable troubles as mental defectiveness, predisposition to tuberculosis, and insanity, there is no reason why the children of cousins should not be as healthy as the children of other people.

Well I did not see that coming.

~RP

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