Title: Louisville Saturday
Author: Margaret Long
Cover artist: Robert Skemp
Yours for: not for sale
Best things about this cover:
- "Louisville Saturday" being regional slang for a three-way. Not to be confused with a "Louisville Sunday," which is a decidedly sex- and alcohol-free evening of potroast and Lawrence Welk at your in-laws.
- This is the first vintage paperback I ever bought. I walked into a used bookstore in Ann Arbor after having read Robert Polito's "Savage Art" (a bio of Jim Thompson) looking for books that looked like the Amazing paperback originals reproduced in the book. It was somehow a revelation to realize that although I couldn't afford Thompson paperbacks, I could afford thousands and thousands of other books that had what I'd admired in the Thompson books—lurid cover art and sensational cover copy. Addiction set in almost immediately.
- Best thing about this cover—better than the young Robert Mitchum stopping dead in his tracks and double-taking on the we-might-be-hookers/friends/lesbians/sisters duo—is Mitchum's primly hatted lady companion, whose face is cut in half but who still has that unmistakable look of "well, I never" and "hussies!" written all over her (half) face.
- ... In An Army Town?!!! Nooooooo! Not that! (seriously, wtf? Replace "Army" with "Zombie," and maybe the drama would seem called for)
- "Frank!" I opened to a random page and was treated to an extended and oddly detailed description of breast-feeding. . . which is frank. Frankish, anyway.
Best things about this back cover:
- "Sort of," HA ha. High praise! "In that she uses words and writes about human beings, she is Totally Hemingwayesque!"
- Look at Sterling North, getting his early male feminist on!
- If this book was ever "burned" (for any reason other than keeping warm in an emergency), I'll eat my hat.
Page 123~
She was now repelled and hotly attracted by memories of swimming parties [1] and the embarrassing, rough nakedness of gross, coarse bodies suddenly exposed in swimming suits. She wondered that the familiar faces were still the same, with the alarming bodies so bare [2], that these men she knew were so shameless and unaware of their disgusting and appealing ugliness. [3]
- "Memories of swimming parties"=not where I thought that sentence was going.
- An allusion, of course, to the phrase that was originally *supposed* to rhyme with "rockets' red glare."
- Wow ... she is, as they say in Louisville, messed up.
~RP
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