Paperback 912: Coming of Age in Samoa / Margaret Mead (Mentor M44)

Paperback 912: Mentor M44 (1st ptg, 1949)

Title: Coming of Age in Samoa
Author: Margaret Mead
Cover artist: jonas

Estimated value: $10-15

Best things about this cover:

• Striking design. Love the stylized monochrome foliage against the stark white backdrop.
• They seem like they're having fun.
• This probably shouldn't remind me of John Travolta and Uma Thurman dancing in "Pulp Fiction," but it does.
• The most important difference between Samoan society and our own is No Nipples ... For Anyone!

Best things about this back cover:

• I enjoy mentally changing "earnestly" (in Dorsey's review) to "salaciously," "lustily," "hornily," and the like.
• Freud!?
• "The domain of erotics." I want to go to there.
• I read "primitive heart-stirrings" as "primitive heart-strings," because it's nicer.

Page 123~

People forgave her violence and her quarrelsomeness for sheer mirth over her propitiatory antics.

She got away with shit 'cause she was fun to be around and sometimes bought the drinks. (You're welcome)

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]

Paperback 899: Messer Marco Polo: a love story / Donn Byrne (Penguin 611)

Paperback 899: Penguin 611 (1st ptg, 1946)

Title: Messer Marco Polo
Author: Donn Byrne
Cover artist: jonas

Estimated value: $9-12

Best things about this cover:

• Honestly I have no idea what's happening here, on any level.
• The palette, the art, the word "Messer" (!?), it's all so ... uncharacteristic of my smutty collection.
• It looks like he's holding an asp in the crook of his left arm.
• This book represents that stage in Penguin's American publishing when it's about to morph into Penguin-Signet and then, finally, Signet.

Best things about this back cover:

• "Punched cows." That's pretty hardboiled.
• If you google, in quotation marks, ["gang of howling literary brigands"], this book, and only this book, shows up. Joyce Kilmer wrote "Trees." Don Marquis is (by total coincidence) my newest literary crush—he wrote light verse in the voice of a cockroach named Archy (who used no capitals or punctuation because cockroaches can't possibly use the Shift key). His books of Archy verse were often illustrated by the legendary George Herriman (of "Krazy Kat" fame).
• Wait, "Messer Marco Polo brought him fame and fortune"? Can that be right?!
• Car crash. Dang.

Page 23~ (book's only 116 pages long!)

And suddenly there's a headsman in a red cloak and a red mask, and the axe swings and falls. The head pops off and the body falls limp.

Somehow the word "pops" sucks all the seriousness out of the situation.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]

Paperback 778: The Old Man / William Faulkner (Signet 692)

Paperback 778: Signet 692 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: The Old Man
Author: William Faulkner
Cover artist: jonas

Yours for: $9


Best things about this cover:

• I like how they're both posing and flexing but there's no audience. "Don't I look like the Lancôme girl…?" "I went to GNC and then the gym so …" The ocean gave no reply.
• I was certain this was "The Old Man and the Sea." This book proves that Faulkner was (exactly) half the writer Hemingway was.
• I'm not feeling either violence or terror. I'm feeling people working on their tans.

Best things about this back cover:

• "Psst, I'm down here. Bottom left corner. Fuckers nearly cropped me out of my own author photo."
• "Desultorily" is a great word. Pretty sure I just read it in John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, also in relation to a character's university education. 
• Faulkner's "stint in Hollywood" famously included co-writing the screenplay for "The Big Sleep" (with Leigh Brackett and that other guy whose name I always forget). 

Page 123~

When he saw the River again, he knew it at once.

Sorry. It was that, or a sentence that's about 90 miles long. No thanks.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]

Paperback 769: God's Little Acre / Erskine Caldwell (Penguin 581)

Paperback 769: Penguin 581 (1st ptg, 1946)

Title: God's Little Acre
Author: Erskine Caldwell
Cover artist: jonas

Yours for: $13


Best things about this cover:

• Do love the peephole covers. Though usually we get to peep at something sexy. Or at least living.
• It's an oddly tepid cover, given how strongly Caldwell's work was associated with sex. Future Caldwell covers will be … less discreet, to put it mildly.
• I believe that to be the smallest outhouse that has ever been painted.

Best things about this back cover:

• Stock photo, lifted from "Generic White Man" entry in Encyclopedia Americana. 
• "Graduating from neither," ha ha. "He sampled your so-called 'higher education' and decided 'fuck this—I'ma pick cotton!"
• That is weirdest way in which anyone's pro football career has ever been introduced. "He was truly fuckable, like a football player, which he was once. Probably. Somewhere."
• Damn, looks like a dog hair got on the scanner platen. Sorry about that.

Page 123~

"Saying he's going to vote for me and doing it when the time comes is as far apart as the land and the sky." 

It's like when Martin beat Bart for class president on "The Simpsons." Everyone said they supported Bart, but only two people voted: Martin and Martin's running mate Wendell.  So Martin won.

Amazing discovery of the day—this book reprints, at the very end, the ruling by the Magistrate's Court of the City of New York, clearing Viking Press (this book's original publisher) from charges of obscenity brought against it by the People of the State of New York at the instigation of The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Based on this information, the oddly sexless cover instantly becomes either more perplexing or more understandable, depending on how you look at it. I have only ever seen this legal opinion-reprinting in the backs of sleaze paperbacks, specifically those published by in the late '50s and early '60s by Sanford Aday, who has his own repeated run-ins with the law. As the opinion reprinted here makes clear, God's Little Acre was defended by many scholars and writers on its literary merits. Harder to argue for said merits when the title of your book is Sex Life of a Cop (as it was in Aday's own trial). Anyway, very cool to discover this much-more-mainstream precedent for self-justifying end matter.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]

Paperback 507: Guilty Bystander / Wade Miller (Penguin Signet 677)

Paperback 507: Penguin Signet 677 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: Guilty Bystander
Author: Wade Miller
Cover artist: jonas

Yours for: $10

Best things about this cover:

• It's like someone threw a vase painted with a decorative seascape right into this dude's eye. That, or his right eye is a kind of dream projector. And he dreams of ... a boat.
• Was Jesus crucified on that boat? There are three crosses. And blood.
• I love jonas's work. More surreal and abstract than the representational style that would come to predominate in the '50s (James Avati covers would come to define the Signet aesthetic once Signet was no longer in this weird hybrid phase with Penguin)

Best things about this back cover:

• Wacky photo!
• Ugh, early pb designers really did flounder—picture should be at least three times its current size and the absurdly long bio + extensive summary of critical history should be cut to ... virtually nothing. This was back when publishers imagined that paperback consumers cared about things like "critics." I mean, can you imagine someone using the word "encomiums" on a crime fiction (or romance or thriller or western) cover today?
• When did people start using the phrase "Hammett-Chandler school" and can we go back in time and unstart using it?
• Boucher was essentially the only critic taking all this crime stuff seriously, so you see him quoted A Lot. He was a big fan of "unexaggerated hardness." But who isn't!?

Page 123~

Ham and eggs and two cups of coffee cost sixty-two cents. Max Thursday put them away at an all-night joint on Market Street and strode in to the Bridgway, jingling three pennies in his pocket. Despite the beating, he felt fairly good. 

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]

Paperback 477: Uncle Tom's Children / Richard Wright (Penguin 647)

Paperback 477: Penguin 647 (1st ptg, 1947)

Title: Uncle Tom's Children
Author: Richard Wright
Cover artist: jonas

Yours for: $20

Best things about this cover:

• Kind of an abrupt shift from all the sexed-up lesbian stuff I've been trafficking in lately.
• Simple, gruesome, effective cover from "jonas," one of the most important early pb cover artists.
• Really digging the title font. Also, that dude's pocket square.

Best things about this back cover:

• Back cover from back when paperbacks still modeled their back covers after those on the insides of hardcover dust jackets. Very straitlaced and informative and decidedly non-sensational.
• The first recipient of the Spingarn medal was Ernest Everett Just (1915). Trivia!

Page 123~

There was silence. Then Hadley laughed, noiselessly.

Laughed noiselessly? You might want to check that he's not choking.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]

Paperback 361: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter / Carson McCullers (Penguin 596)

Paperback 361: Penguin 596 (1st ptg, 1946)

Title: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Author: Carson McCullers
Cover artist: jonas

Yours for: $12


Best things about this cover:

• This looks like scraps from the picture file for a Monty Python animation sketch
• A rebus! I love these. OK, I'm going to say ... "Your heart cannot soar if your hands are chained ... and a kid sells fruit." Powerful stuff.
• Good example of the more abstract cover style of the '40s (jonas is legendary, and prolific)

Best things about this back cover:

• It's just a bio, so ... not much to say.
• Interesting how much focus is on her apparently surprising ability to treat "Negro" characters as if they were (news flash!) human beings. I guess that's all just in the Wright quote, but it stands out.
• This is my third "Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" cover. See also here and here.

Page 123~

Portia took up the Bible from the table in the center of the room. "What part you want to hear now, Grandpapa?"

"It all the book of the Holy Lord. Just any place your eye fall on will do."

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

Paperback 356: The Cask / Freeman Willis Crofts (Penguin 575)

Paperback 356: Penguin 575 (1st ptg, 1946)

Title: The Cask
Author: Freeman Willis Crofts
Cover artist: Uncredited (jonas?)

Yours for: $7


Best things about this cover:

• It's a mystery. A mystery about ... a cask, I'm guessing. Hey, they can't all be Strip-Tease Girl.
• I like how there's a picture of a cask on the cover. In case I'd forgotten the title. I also like the wee mustachioed man.
• I do like the color scheme. And the soft tones and surreal shapes of the buildings and street.

Best things about this back cover:

• Freeman Willis [zzzzzzzzzz....]. This is *literally* more than you'd ever want to know about Freeman Willis Crofts.
  
• This is from when paperbacks were still trying to be highbrow and were taking themselves way too seriously. In just a few years things would get sexed up and pulped up and generally get interesting.

Page 123~

"It is with the utmost regret I have to tell you, M. Boirac, that your wife was undoubtedly murdered by strangulation. Further, you must know that she had been dead several days when that photograph was taken."

Wow. Blunt.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

57 Books from the University Book Sale: Books 35 and 36

Last two non-fiction (-ish) books from my library sale haul. They make a nice pair, I think.

Title: Jefferson: A Great American's Life and Ideas (Mentor 70 — 2nd ptg, Dec. 1952)
Author: Saul K. Padover
Cover artist: Jonas

Yours for: $5

• Love the way "Abridged" is used as a major selling point — "Finally, our most important Founding Father, in a dose you can manage!"
• Floating Head of Thomas Jefferson backed by the Floating Declaration of Independence. My Most Powerful, Floatingest cover ever.
• "This planting season, why not outfit your team with Dr. E. J. Samuelson's newly patented Invisible Oxen Rigging! Amaze your friends as your oxen appear to pull your plow by sheer force of mind alone ..."

• "Living Words ... written on dead sheep."

Page 123~

For Aaron Burr was not famous for virtue or steadfastness of character, and the idea of such a man's occupying the presidential chair was disturbing to responsible men.

Title: Masters of Deceit (Pocket Books 75099 — 22nd ptg!?!?!, 1966)
Author: J. Edgar Hoover
Cover artist: Ben Feder (designer)

Yours for: $10

• "The Communists Will Spray Our Most Precious Documents with Ketchup, Make No Mistake!"

• "Hello, Frederick's of Hollywood? This is, uh, Edwina Hooverston ..."
• Blurbed his own book. Clever.

Page 123~

Five minutes later, a fourth person, a woman in a dark coat, arrives. Everything is quiet: no loud voices, no cars parked in front, no reason for the neighbors to suspect that a Communist Party meeting is in progress.

This book is really a fantastic window into Cold War paranoia. I might actually read it.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

Paperback 256: About the Kinsey Report / eds. Donald Porter Geddes and Enid Curie (Signet 675)

Paperback 256: Signet 675 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: About the Kinsey Report: Observations by 11 Experts on "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male"
Authors: various
Cover artist: jonas

Yours for: $6


Best things about this cover:

• "Sexual Behavior in Male Mannequins with Irregular Heartbeats"
• This is pretty much as dull as these covers get. This book is impt from a historical standpoint, but not from an aesthetic one. "jonas" is a great early cover artist. Lots of great stylized, abstract covers from him on Penguin and Signet books in particular. This cover doesn't do him justice.
• The Kinsey Report was a boon for sellers of trashy fiction because they could (and did, in spades) use the data about unconventional (e.g. non-heterosexual, non-reproductive) sexuality from Kinsey's studies to justify and hype their books under the guise of the public's right to exercise its scientific curiosity. We'll see hilarious examples of this kind of self-serving cover copy many times in future installments of this blog.

Best things about this back cover:

• Small text! Who doesn't love that!?
• Signet is testing the waters here, waiting to see if their readers do indeed have "fair and open minds." Hence the very boring, scientific-looking, toned-down cover (and cover copy — you don't even see the words "masturbation" or "homosexuality," for instance). The U.S. mass-market paperback doesn't take a serious, overtly sexual turn for another few years, but once Gold Medal comes along with its sensational paperback originals and saucy covers, the heat starts to go up, and by 1960, it's a sexual free-for-all (see Paperbacks 252 and 253, among others).

Page 123~

It is not good to find masturbation continuing as a heavy factor in the sex outlet of married men among the better educated group.

I ... uh ... what?

~RP