Paperback 911: Darkness at Noon / Arthur Koestler (Signet 671)

Paperback 911: Signet 671 (2nd ptg, 1950)

Title: Darkness at Noon
Author: Arthur Koestler
Cover artist: [jonas?]

Estimated value: $7-10

Best things about this cover:

• This looks like me at roughly 9:30am on the days I don't teach. Minus the cigarette, I mean. Ladies ... liquor ... mystery dude in a hat ... these are where my thoughts wander.
• This is a classic, but I haven't read it. I am surprised to find it is about a lazy dude fantasizing about Parisian booze and broads.
• It's a prison novel, but this doesn't really evoke prison. Faint hints of "brick" in the walls, but that robe looks too comfy for prisonwear.

Best things about this back cover:

• Ah, the era of the author-smoking photo. So ... debonair.
• But also so tiny, what the hell's with the picture shrinkage?
• That cover copy does not offer much in the way of breathing room. Yikes.

Page 123~

Woe to the fool and the aesthete who only ask how and not why.

This is in the middle of a dense philosophical section that is all italics and also a bummer.

~RP

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Paperback 453: So Strange Our Love / Joseph Heron (Newsstand Library U159)

Paperback 453: Newsstand Library U159 (PBO, 1961)

Title: So Strange Our Love
Author: Joseph Heron
Cover artist: Uncredited [Robert Bonfils]

Yours for: $14


Best things about this cover:

• First impression: yeah, that's pretty strange.
• Honey, you're gonna have to move that thing a little closer to his face. From the squinting, I'd say dude is clearly too nearsighted to appreciate it from that distance. At this rate, he's never going to put his Eiffel Tower anywhere near your frenzied river, let alone your secret and turbulent rapids.
• Wow, "forked" is a word that really kills the mood.

Best things about this back cover:

• OK, I get it, only Mireille. Stop shouting at me.
• "forked" : front cover :: "nostrils" : back cover
• "Pointed" — man, talk about your adventures in bad word choice.
• "... under the touch of his fingers her nipple swelled" — I wonder if that looked anything like this picture we've seen before.
  
• I'm trying to find the part in that last paragraph where they actually start fucking. Not entirely clear. If I read it literally, it's like she gets him in some kind of wrestling hold with her legs, and he's cool with that, but then she starts writhing and ululating and speaking in tongues. No wonder he's keeping his distance on the front cover.

Page 123~

She picked up a pack of cigarettes from the table and lit one. "And yet if Johny had been a man, you wouldn't mind it," she said. "When you thought she was a man, you didn't."

If Johny had been a man, he'd have figured out how to spell his name properly. By the way, dude's name is Ken and he's just discovered that MIREILLE! sleeps with girls. Or girl, at any rate.

~RP

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