Paperback 951: Skin and Bones / Thorne Smith (Pocket Books 490)

Paperback 951: Pocket Books 490 (3rd ptg, 1948)

Title: Skin and Bones
Author: Thorne Smith
Cover artist (and illus.): [Herbert Roese]

Estimated value: $not a lot
Condition: 3/10

Best things about this cover:

• Dang. I'm sure there's an innocent enough explanation for whatever is happening here, but for a late '40s cover, this is pretty ... saucy. It's like she's looking over her shoulder going, "Well, get on with it, then..." and he's trying to figure out how one removes these bloody stocking contraptions.
• I love that when I was tagging this post, the category of "all fours" already existed.
• Thorne Smith was a very big deal in the mid-century "humor" game.

Best things about this back cover:

• Frankly, this sounds amazing.
• "Hoarse, gamy laughter" is what I just emitted upon reading that phrase.
• I never noticed that the kangaroo, in this incarnation of the Pocket Books logo, kinda looks like he (!?) has a giant book erection.

Page 123~

"Sure," said the drunken mortician, growing a little tired of the Rev. Watts.

~RP

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Paperback 940: The Problem of the Wire Cage / John Dickson Carr (Bantam 304)

Paperback 940: Bantam 304 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: The Problem of the Wire Cage
Author: John Dickson Carr
Cover artist: Gilbert Fullington

Estimated value: $10-15
Condition: 9/10

Best things about this cover:

• Game, set, MURDER!
• MURDER, anyone?!
• MURDER commits a foot fault!
• "Oh my, I think he's dead. I'll just check his pulse. Let's see, I ... I just push my hand against his left shoulder, right? Like this? Right, Steve? Steve, honey, is this right? Knuckles-to-shoulder?"
• So much Fear Hand in this picture. They are both double-Fear-Handing it, for the rare QuadraFearHand™.
• "She's trapped in there with a corpse! How will I ever ... oh wait this is just a chain link fence, I'll just walk around ha ha silly me."

Best things about this back cover:

• MURDER has a respectable two-hand backhand!
• *Someone* has never solved a jigsaw puzzle, or sucks at metaphors.
• Old Nick Young, winner of Most Oxymoronic Name three years running. Take that, Big Steve Small!

Page 123~

"I suppose you know you could get into a lot of trouble for what you've been doing here today?"
The words jerked Hugh upright.

No more jerking, Hugh! 

~RP

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Paperback 897: Love Is the Winner / Natalie Shipman (Bantam 451)

Paperback 897: Bantam 451 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: Love Is the Winner
Author: Natalie Shipman
Cover artist: Nelson Davis

Estimated value: ~$15

Best things about this cover:

• And Joan is the loser.
• You can tell by Joan's face that she is *not* going to lose her man to some cut-rate Lauren Bacall. "First, watercress sandwiches. Then ... revenge!"
• That knob at fake-Bacall's crotch level is, to put it mildly, distracting.
• I'd say the paperback title is an upgrade. "Who Wins His Love" = the "Who's on First" of book titles.

Best things about this back cover:

• I am serious when I say I want the top third of this cover on a t-shirt. WHAT'S A GIRL TO DO indeed.
• "Or shall she turn to another man..." Wait, were there really no other options in there?
• Are the demanding lips forming words that are demanding, or are they just ... really muscular and squirmy on your face?

Page 123~

"Are you having lunch with Jim?" Mrs. Converse had asked before she left.
"I'm going to telephone him," Kathy said. "He may be tied up."

I have to imagine him literally tied up, because otherwise this ends up being the single most boring Page 123 I've ever read.

~RP

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Paperback 896: Ecstasy Girl / Jack Woodford (Novel Library 2)

Paperback 896: Novel Library 2 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: Ecstasy Girl
Author: Jack Woodford
Cover artist: Uncredited

Estimated value: ~$25

Best things about this cover:

• My armpits bring all the boys to the yard!
• Is that a cut-out or some kind of avant-garde necktie?
• "I'm hung down to here, baby." "Oh, Brad..."
• His hands are alarmingly tiny.

Best things about this back cover:

• I have decided that Handsome Gail Tanner's first name is Handsome so please don't tell me different.
• "Dropped an anatomic bomb!" That sounds both fun and grotesque.
• Ladies: if your earl does not provoke swoons, keep walking.

Page 123~

"Now, please, Miss Carter, please, don't excite yourself further." The station manager backed hastily away.

It's hard to back away hastily. You so often smash into things. Miss Carter's autoerotic adventures must have been truly startling.

~RP

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Paperback 812: The Black Curtain / Cornell Woolrich (Dell 208)

Paperback 812: Dell 208 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: The Black Curtain
Author: Cornell Woolrich
Cover artist: George Frederiksen

Yours for: $30


Best things about this cover:

• Me: "Why is the right side of the cover all blacked out? … oh, that's the black curtain. I see…"
• The Michelin Man stalks his next victim.
• The Michelin Man is ready for his midnight duel.
• The Michelin Man feels deep satisfaction at how thoroughly he has painted the town red.

Best things about this back cover:

• Mapback!
• 3=trees; 4=trees; 5=darker trees; 6=shrubs…
• Architectural blueprints! 
• You have to go through the pantry to get from the kitchen to the dining room?
• "Don't go in that room." "Why, what's in there?" "Old man." "O dear god!"

Page 123~

"How is it that don't have the estate fenced in?" he asked. "Leave it open like this for anyone to trespass—"

Pretty sure that first question is missing a word. Also pretty sure "We'll have to feel out way through the rough" (on the same page) contains a typo. So … no more blaming the internet for shitty editing.

~RP

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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

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Paperback 777: The Thursday Turkey Murders / Craig Rice (Pocket Books 461)

Paperback 777: Pocket Books 461 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: The Thursday Turkey Murders
Author: Craig Rice
Cover artist: William Wirtz

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• Would not have thought a cover featuring a half-naked woman could be this dull and ugly, but evidence is evidence.
• Seriously, terrible painting. I can't even glean context from this thing. Where is she? It's like she's in some creepy guy's ice-fishing shack, looking out in a Dali-esque winter landscape. After an earthquake that has left everything oddly atilt. Plus the painting is all smeary. Blargh.
• Craig Rice was a woman. See also Leigh Brackett. They both ghost-wrote novels for actor George Sanders in the 1940s.

Best things about this back cover:

• This book is part of Rice's "Bingo and Handsome" series, which is the title of a mediocre TNT comedy-crime drama waiting to happen.
• "Baby, your skin is the color of extra-thick whipping cream." Nope. You can say this in as many different voices as you like. Not sexy.
• I will say that "A figure that would have made Venus jump back into the ocean" is pretty damn good, as cover copy writing goes (admittedly low bar).

Page 123~

"Now a bullet from a high-powered rifle would go through a feller's head and come out the other side without making much of a hole, providing the feller had the right kind of bones in his skull and that the rifle was shot off from far enough way [sic]."

I have no idea what it means, but "The Right Kind of Bones" would make an excellent book title.

~RP

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Paperback 773: The Sea of Grass / Conrad Richter (Pocket Book 413)

Paperback 773: Pocket Book 413 (4th ptg, 1948)

Title: The Sea of Grass
Author: Conrad Richter
Cover artist: "Troop" (?)

Yours for: $10


Best things about this cover:

• Pretty dour, tepid stuff. Two screen legends just looking at each other against a (literal?) sea of grass.
• I prefer a photo cover, or something more dynamic, for my movie tie-ins.
• The book's in startlingly good condition. That's about the only good thing I can say about it.

Best things about this back cover:

• It's not really fair if you fight only the *old* Indians.
• I see your problem, buddy. You got one of them there imported wives. You really gotta buy domestic.
• The "lowest possible price" is zero, Pocket Books, you liars.

Page 23~ (book's only 118 pp. long)

[A] spray of pink loco weed had been pinned freshly across her basque and she still moved with undiminished sparkle and aliveness.

I liked "loco weed" better before I looked it up and realized that it does not, in fact, make you "loco."

~RP

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Paperback 757: Hammett Homicides / Dashiell Hammett (Dell 223)

Paperback 757: Dell 223 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: Hammett Homicides
Author: Dashiell Hammett
Cover artist: Gerald Gregg

Yours for: $30


Best things about this cover:

• Taste the (lead) rainbow!
• Uh, guys? I think it's probably dead now.
• I see a pretty butterfly.
• Gerald Gregg is my favorite early, semi-abstract, non-sleazy cover artist.

Best things about this back cover:

• [ahem] … MAPBACK!
• So iconic—Hammett's S.F.!
• Sausaleto? What the?! … aw, I can't stay mad at you, mapback! Come here!

Page 123~ (opening paragraph of "The Main Death")

The captain told me Hacken and Begg were handling the job. I caught them leaving the detectives' assembly room. Begg was a freckled heavyweight, as friendly as a Saint Bernard puppy, but less intelligent. Lanky Detective-Sergeant Hacken, not so playful, carried the team's brains behind his worried hatchet face.

~RP

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Paperback 676: Rope / Alfred Hitchcock [No Author Credit] [Don Ward] (Dell 262)

Paperback 676: Dell 262 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: Rope
Author: Uncredited [Don Ward] ("from the famous play by Patrick Hamilton")
Cover artist: Gerald Gregg

Yours for: $25


Best things about this cover:

• Hello, handsome.
• Fantastic early movie tie-in. Weird that there is No Writing Credit, anywhere. I do not think that Alfred Hitchcock "wrote" this, in any meaningful sense of that word. I thought "novelizations" got credit. But maybe not in this era (?).
• Gerald Gregg's cityscape is an understated but gorgeous detail.

Best things about this back cover:

• Hell yeah, mapback! 3D mapback!
• I've seen more interesting mapbacks, but I do like how much detail you can see in this house. The arc of the coffee table, the tile pattern in the bathroom. 
• That keyhole eyeball really is one of the great icons in paperback history. Up there with the damned kangaroo.

Page 123~

Something seemed to be slowly tearing in Phillip's mind, destroying the fabric of his slim residue of control.

Wow. "The fabric of his slim residue of control" has all the elegance of a rusted-out Ford Fiesta.

~RP

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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

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Paperback 498: Ride the Pink Horse / Dorothy B. Hughes (Dell 210)

Paperback 498: Dell 210 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: Ride the Pink Horse
Author: Dorothy B. Hughes
Cover artist: [Gerald Gregg]

Yours for: $10

Best things about this cover:

• That zombie is going to Town on that horse flank!
• "Riding the Pink Horse" would make a great slang phrase / euphemism. Maybe for ... when you are consuming lots of Pepto Bismol. Ask me about my two other suggestions! (warning: they involve sexuality and menstrual flow, respectively)
• I know some carnival rides give people motion sickness, but I had no idea a carousel could wreck a guy that bad. Down to his hair.

Best things about this back cover:

• Mapback!
• Visually, this not that interesting. Just a cluster of dots on a lined white back ground. Like someone used it for target practice. Nice cluster.
• I love the expressive lines coming off the Cross of the Martyrs. Nice comic booky touch.
• But what is that thing projecting out from beneath it? Sconces Gone Wild!

Page 123~

"I'd take a drink. This Sunday law is a hindrance. To a working man."

"... and that's the last thing I remember saying. Three days later I came to, draped over a carousel horse, my mouth tasting of cigarettes, vomit, and whore."

~RP

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Paperback 460: American Sexual Behavior and the Kinsey Report (Bantam 227)

Paperback 460: Bantam 227 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: American Sexual Behavior and the Kinsey Report
Authors: Morris L. Ernst and David Loth
Cover artist: N/a

Yours for: $11

Best things about this cover:

• Just consider this a sucky cover interlude—if I'm gonna put up all my books, then I'm gonna put up all my books.

Best things about this back cover:

• The authors have done a service to the "lay public." That sounds about right.
• Now that I see the cover of the original hardbound edition, I realize I own this book in both editions. Weird.

Page 123~

The Kinsey Report may save a good many homes

For instance, if you get enough of them together, you can fashion a levee.

~RP 

P.S. please enjoy this forgotten bookmark, which I just pulled from the book while looking for p. 123




The back of this clipping is actually much more entertaining:


Highlights: McCarthy vs. the "Slot Machine King"! Hitler maps! "Jilted Lover Slays Blonde!" and, of course, advice from AUNT HET: "Men shouldn't go visitin' too often. They say about what they said the last time, but it sounds fresh if you haven't heard it for six months." 

Paperback 436: Midsummer Passion / Erskine Caldwell (Avon 177)

Paperback 436: Avon 177 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: Midsummer Passion
Author: Erskine Caldwell
Cover artist: Ann Cantor

Yours for: $19


Best things about this cover:

• "With your permission, my lady ... May I sniff these?"
• He is appropriately grubby. She is impossibly clean.
• All I can think is "Really? Right on a bed of lettuce? Isn't there a nice flat patch of lawn nearby where you can have your furtive rustic tumble?"

Best things about this back cover:

• Once again, Shakespeare approves!

Page 123~

"I ain't going to let that good-for-nothing Canuck get his hands on the best farm in the whole gol-darned country. Come on to the village and get it settled right away."

For some Boston Bruins fans, winning the Stanley Cup was not enough. Canucks must be made to suffer year-round!

~RP

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Paperback 362: Bury Me Deep / Harold Q. Masur (Pocket Books 558)

Paperback 362: Pocket Books 558 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: Bury Me Deep
Author: Harold Q. Masur
Cover artist: William Wirts

Yours for: $20


Best things about this cover:

• A quintessential keyhole cover (yes, it's a thing) — and an early one. Turns reader into an implied voyeur / peeping tom.
• 1948 (or thereabouts) seems to be a turning point in cover art — covers start to become more sensational, more sexual, more lurid ... If you click on "1947" or earlier in the tags for this site (sidebar), you'll see what I mean. Not sure why 1948 should be that year [the year of the first Kinsey Report!] ... but by the '50s, lurid and sensational will be the norm.
• I wish I could hear her undoubtedly learned disquisition on the merits of half-naked whisky-drinking.
• That underwear looks painted on, like she was drawn naked but then repurposed for this cover.
• Something about her face is off-kilter and strange, and her thumbless whisky-claw is mega-disturbing.

Best things about this back cover:

• Even the tagline is sensational. Sweet.
• "The lawyer in him" has the better cliché—hey, "inner man," who looks at a sexy woman in her underwear and thinks "gift horse!?"
• "Newest detective sensation," HA ha. How did that turn out, Scott Jordan?

Page 123~

Another shot exploded. I saw a spurt of flame from the muzzle spit luridly into the darkness beside a tree not fifty yards away. I arched my back, screamed like a frightened horse, threw out my arms and tumbled drunkenly to the ground.

Mmm, manly.

~RP

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Paperback 349: Oh, You Tex! / William MacLeod Raine (Pocket Books 78)

Paperback 349: Pocket Books 78 (7th ptg, 1948)

Title: Oh, You Tex!
Author: William MacLeod Raine
Cover artist: Roswell Keller

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• What the Hell is Happening!?!?! The perspective ... it's hurting ...
• "Chief Green Jeans was sunning himself on a rock, when all of a sudden ...!"
• I want to say that that woman was *clearly* photo-shopped into this picture, but ...
• This is like an abstract expressionist painting, with occasional humanesque figures.
• Fear hand!
• I do not quite get the punctuation of the title. "Oh, You Tex!" Is she ungrammatically affirming that that is his name? Is she calling him a "Tex" the way you might call some a "Brute" or "Bastard?" Is she excited to learn that he texts, but, like your mom, doesn't quite know the right word for it?
• William MacLeod Raine wrote the hell out of some westerns. His books are Everywhere in used pb shops.

Best things about this back cover:

• There are sexier names for a dame than "Wadley."
• Apparently there is no good synonym for "gun-play," so they just went ahead and used it twice. Sorry, just looked at the front cover—make that three times. Oh wait, I see, the front blurb is just a barely changed version of the last line on the back cover. Don't break your backs trying to be original, guys.

Page 123~

Cowboys left their partners standing in the middle of the floor. The musicians dropped their bows and fiddles. Bartenders left unfilled the orders they had just taken.

The cause? The Rapture! Just kidding. It's injuns.

~RP

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Paperback 302: Behold This Woman / David Goodis (Bantam 407)

Paperback 302: Bantam 407 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: Behold This Woman
Author: David Goodis
Cover artist: William Shoyer

Yours for: $40


Best things about this cover:

• Only four?
• Behold these boobs!
• Love the guy's hand: "... must ... not ... fondle ..."
• Notice how often woman is front and center on pb covers while man is off to side, lopped off, seen from behind, kind of in shadows, etc. Woman is meant to be a very particular dish, while man is usu. a kind of Everyman. Or Anysap, I guess.
• Now that I look more closely at the picture, I think that the guy is an interior decorator who is having a coronary after witnessing the pink rococo orgasm that is this room.

Best things about this back cover:

• I'm going to go with ... the knife jammed into the window sill. Yes, that's the best thing.
• Actually, I'm loving the little blue and pink Yes / Buts.
• Wow, the original cover girl for "Behold This Woman" was all kinds of ugly.

Page 123~

The gray-haired man was annoyed. "What do you mean, help you?" he said. "What do you take me for, an ignoramus?"

~RP

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Paperback 296: The Dreadful Night / Ben Ames Williams (Popular Library 155)

Paperback 296: Popular Library 155 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: The Dreadful Night
Author: Ben Ames Williams
Cover artist: Rudolph Belarski

Yours for: $16


Best things about this cover:

• "Hello, police, I'm being pursued by ... hello? ... damn, this isn't my phone!"
• Rudolph Belarski: Master of DramaticHands (TM)
• That look is not fear. It is sadistic glee. And the man with the hands is not coming after her. He's about to keel over backwards. See, she has just plucked his heart from his chest with one vicious, kungfu strike. "Ha, take that, you bastard! Hey, I can hear the ocean in this thing..."
• "A Novel of Love, Hate and Death" — yep, that pretty much covers it.
• That's some structured swimwear, that is.
• Why is she at the seashore during a thunderstorm?

Best things about this back cover:

• Text me!
• "Adah Capello!" — no offense to all the ADAHs out there, but come on!
• God, these Popular Library back cover write-ups are dreadful. It's like a 9-yr-old kind of sort of recounting what happens in a book he's just read.

Page 123~

Marco the dog was there [I want to stop the quote right there], swimming this way and that, barking incessantly in a frenzied and pitiful fashion; behind his head a wide ripple spread as he quested to and fro..."

Uh ... "quested?" Is he a knight-dog?

~RP

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Paperback 294: Lady in Peril / Ben Ames Williams (Popular Library 164)

Paperback 294: Popular Library 164 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: Lady in Peril
Author: Ben Ames Williams
Cover artist: Rudolph Belarski

Yours for: $23

It's "LADY IN PERIL" week at "Pop Sensation" — three early Popular Library covers all featuring ... yes, you guessed it, LADIES IN PERIL. First up, "LADY IN PERIL" —


Best things about this cover:

• "I'll be back in five minutes, I swear!"
• You have to be superhot to pull off wearing that much of that color. This lady (in peril) succeeds. Dress alone = OK, but dress + long gloves = wow.
• This cover rules and Rudolph Belarski was a pulp art genius. Such great lurid action. Just the idea of a lady dressed like this trying to escape out of what appears to be at least a second-story window — that's enough to convince me that peril is for real.
• Hand-on-wrist action right in the dead center of the cover, combined with the vividness of her splayed, aqua hand, really creates a sense of immediacy here.
• Her hair is fancy, her horrified expression believable, her rack exquisite.

Best things about this back cover:

• Inspector Tope, HA ha. That character writes itself. Not enough fall-down-drunk detectives in the crime fiction canon for my tastes.
• The sentence that begins "During..." is so convoluted that it makes me want to shoot myself, others.

Page 123~

And it was only when her back was turned that he realized she wore over her nightgown a negligee of metal cloth, bright as silver. This was Lola Cyr!

When are metal negligees going to make their comeback? I like a lady who's not afraid to wear chain mail to bed.

~RP

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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