Paperback 879: Number One / John Dos Passos (Lion Library LL1)

Paperback 879: Lion Library LL1 (1st ptg, 1954)

Title: Number One
Author: John Dos Passos
Cover artist: Robert Schulz

Estimated value: $10-15

Best things about this cover:

• When you start shooting up bourbon, your friends naturally get a bit concerned.
• He's right to be freaked out. If you look at her left hand too long, you too will begin to get the creeping sense that she's an ALIEN, MAN.
• Pee. This book is about pee. You don't want to read the sequel.
• Clever bit of publishing here on Lion Library's part. This is the first (i.e. Number One) book to come out under the Lion Library imprint.

Best things about this back cover:

• "Why is there a ladybug in here!? Who authorized this?! I'm gonna swat it, so help me …!"
• "There's no floor here! No floor! It just … stops." "Er, it's a stage, sir, that's what stages do." "I don't care, someone should've told me, Brian! You're fired!"
• John Dos Passos came to earth to study curious earthling types.

Page 123~

As he looked out through the glass doors of the phone booth at the bustle of dressy people, men in sportsclothes with cigars, frilly stoutish women with skittish hats, pretty girls in long evening dresses, young men out to have themselves a time, he felt an invisible sour smoke swirling between them and him.

I mistyped several words while transcribing this. Every time I looked to see what I'd screwed up, I was like "Yeah, that's better." This passage crystallizes noir—"good times" seen at a sad, knowing, alienated remove. Deromanticized. Surface appearances all revealed as desperate posturing. This is Don Draper just before he goes "fuck it" and just takes off across the country in his Caddy.

~RP

PS check out that "SCHULZ" signature, etched right into the side of the damned table. I always did love how he made his signature part of the three-dimensional world of the painting.

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Paperback 357: Night Train / Kenneth Millar (Ross Macdonald) (Lion Library LL40)

Paperback 357: Lion Library LL40 (2nd ptg / 1st thus, 1955)

Title: Night Train
Author: Kenneth Millar
Cover artist: Samson Pollen

Yours for: $22


Best things about this cover:

• I think there is a single scene in this book that is set in a jazz club. Why they have completely de-crime-fictionized this cover, I don't know ("A Bold Story of Fierce Desire"??), but I'm glad they did—the painting is fantastic: vibrant and chaotic. You rarely see a black woman in the position of sexy dame on these covers—very nice.
• I like the guy right behind her—the guy you are very likely to miss if you're sucked into either the playing/dancing or the steamy glance between Ms. Bar Lady and Mr. Ne'er-Do-Well. The guy behind her—he's the one I want to know. He's either tailing that guy, or he's just thinking "Really? That guy? She must be working some angle..."
• Love the guy in the foreground with the cigar! He is sooo happy to have that cigar!
• What is up with the letter spacing on the tagline? Letters get closer together as title moves left to right. It's like a 3rd grader wrote it by hand and ran out of room as she approached the right margin
  

Best things about this back cover:

• This is (pretty much) the cover of the original Lion edition of this book (which I own ... hey, wait, I've already blogged it—it's here! Check out the art parallels)
• Ross Macdonald was (understandably) saddled with the "Chandler/Hammett" mantle early on in his career, and despite a period of phenomenal fame (peaking around 1970), he just wasn't the artist either Hammett or Chandler was, and hasn't had their longevity. I know I am in the minority here, but I'm not a big Macdonald fan; I especially don't care for the Lew Archer stuff. Archer's just a smarmy, dull, self-righteous Marlowe. A Not-Marlowe. A Marl-faux. Sadly, he's also the model for virtually every P.I. that came after him.
• There is more than a "trace" of Freud in Macdonald's work; when reading Macdonald, I often feel like I'm reading a novel whose sole purpose is to illustrate some concept from Psychology 101. If I remember correctly, though, this pre-Lew Archer stuff is pretty tight and entertaining.

Page 123~

Mrs. Tessinger was extraordinarily vivacious. Her bosom seemed higher than ever, and her waist tighter.

That's a nice, lecherous eye the narrator has there.

~RP

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Paperbacks 284-287: The work of Clark Hulings

Sorry for missing Wednesday. First week of school had me a bit overwhelmed and I completely spaced. To make up for it — a glut of paperbacks. Four, to be precise, all featuring the cover art of Clark Hulings. I culled all the Hulings covers I had and scanned them at the request of someone producing an article on Hulings for Illustration magazine. Sadly, upon perusing the covers I have, there's no signature style that I can see, and no one cover that really makes you go 'wow.' They are all very typical mid '50s covers, but only "Savage Holiday" really gives Hulings a broad enough canvas to have a real artistic impact. The others crowd the cover with text and offer only tiny pictures — mostly free-floating heads. Cover for "Winesburg, Ohio" is about as dull and generic as they come. The clear WINner here is "The Brave, Bad Girls." Bold, bright design with fantastic background use of the familiar fedora'd and trenchcoated detective. Coincidentally (I assume), two of these covers deal with interracial themes.

Paperback 284: Lion Library 47 (PBO, 1954)

Title: Strange Barriers
Author: J. Vernon Shea (ed.)

Yours for: $12


Best things about this cover:

• "Strange Fruit" + "Racial Barriers" = "Strange Barriers"
• Given the tagline, this cover is *very* disappointing. Where's the tumult, I ask!?
• These heads are drawn in different styles, to different scales, with different textures ... we get it, they're different! There's a "barrier." etc.
• Mark Schorer?

Best things about this back cover:

• "I'm enthralled by his jazz trumpeting, but his shirtless gun-toting just makes me howl with laughter."
• Man, I really, really wish I knew what was going on in that last panel.

Paperback 285: Avon T-86 (PBO!!!?, 1954)

Title: Savage Holiday
Author: Richard Wright

Yours for: $25


Best things about this cover:

• Oh no, why is bed-headed Anthony Perkins attacking Lena Horne!?
• "I was just borrowing your Dick Tracy trenchcoat! I swear I was gonna put it back!"
• Love the random pseudo-japonesque pattern on those curtains.
• "I've made my decision, Steve. I choose the roses — not you."
• Her hands look very wrong — like she's got extra fingers or stubby fingers or fused fingers or something.

Best things about this back cover:

• The first and last time "The Yale Review" was used as a blurb on a paperback book.

Paperback 286: Signet 1304 (2nd ptg, 1956)

Title: Winesburg, Ohio
Author: Sherwood Anderson

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• "Breathe, damn you, breathe! Oh, why won't that doctor stop staring wistfully into the distance and get over here and help me!"

Best things about this back cover:

• Why is there no picture of "The girl who walked naked in the rain"!? Booooo!
• Thank god my neighbors "completely hide their private lives from" me. Barely repressed anger + miniature fainting couches (!?) = some crazy-ass !@#@ I don't need to know about.

Paperback 287: Perma Books M-3089 (1st ptg, 1957)

Title: The Brave, Bad Girls
Author: Thomas B. Dewey

Yours for: $9


Best things about this cover:

• Damned sticker pull!
• Red-on-yellow Totally makes this cover pop. Beautiful.
• Looove the expression on Girl 1 — nice, smug F@#$ You expression to complement the (in order) Just Woke Up, Meek and Scared, and Suicidally Depressed expressions of the others.

Best things about this back cover:

• "A Man! A Man, I say!"
• "A large pea?" — wtf? Like ... a marble? A dime? How big is a "large pea?" Are we talking freakishly, County-Fair-ribbon-winning large or what?
• Things Not To Say To A Lady You Just Met: "Just for tonight ... I wish you were seventeen."

Page 123~

• I was a friend of Karl Kadek's ("The Brave, Bold Girls")
• He took a cheap revolver from the case and began to wave it about. "You get out of here!" he shrieked. "We don't want any collar fasteners here!" ("Winesburg, Ohio")
• "On a Sunday morning?" There was a trace of scorn in his voice. "And what would he be doing barefooted?" ("Savage Holiday")
• Then he saw the hole in Jenny's side, right between the ribs. It was round, wet, red. ("Almos a Man" by Richard Wright —from "Strange Barriers")

Jenny is a mule, for the record.

~RP

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Paperback 283: Adventures of a Young Man / John Dos Passos (Lion Library 42)

Paperback 283: Lion Library LL42 (1st ptg, 1955)

Title: Adventures of a Young Man
Author: John Dos Passos
Cover artist: Clark Hulings

Yours for: $11


Best things about this cover:

• "Steve approached trench warfare with an air of whimsy, never letting a silly helmet ruin his perfectly coiffed blond mane."
• "Steve, how come when you hug me it feels like you're killing Germans?"
• Let's play: What's Steve Doing With His Mouth!? Choices a. gnawing on Gillian's brains, zombie-style, b. licking the chocolate out of her hair (don't ask), c. laughing at his own inability to find the bra strap, or d. Steve has no mouth — he lost it in the war.
• Hey, it's Clark Hulings Week this week at "Pop Sensation" — not because of any particularly burning desire on my part to write about him, but because I've had a request from Illustration magazine for some hi-res scans of Hulings covers, and so I've moved all his work to the front of the queue.
  

Best things about this back cover:

• "Gillian, your father and I strongly disapprove of your sleeping in the nude. Also, as you can see by our presence in your room, security in this apartment is terrible. You could at least get a dead bolt."
• Steve is doing his "going bowling" dance. Step slide, step slide ...
• If that is a train he's grabbing, and it is moving, he is about to be dragged to his bloody death. So ironic — surviving WWI only to be needlessly dragged to death on his way to a bowling engagement.
• Front cover scanned at 400dpi, back cover scanned at 200dpi. Can you see the difference?

Page 123~

Sometimes he wished he was a rolling stone like Glenn; but if you were going to raise stuff, corn or stock or babies, you just had to stay put.

~RP

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Paperback 199: Don't You Weep, Don't You Moan / Richard Coleman (Lion Library LL28)

Paperback 199: Lion Library LL28 (1st ptg, 1955)

Title: Don't You Weep, Don't You Moan
Author: Richard Coleman
Cover artist: Samson Pollen

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• "We'll make our first incision ... here."
• "I'm just putting the final touches on my remarkably realistic head sculpture. . . there. Done."
• "Do those shoes look shined to you, you incompetent !@#@#!"
• Can you tell I'm just trying to think of captions that don't involve her demanding oral sex.
• This woman could be the slightly classier sister of Tombolo lady. Derisive sneer. Half akimbo stance. Tramptacular outfit. Etc.
• I love the abrasion and fraying on this cover - really drives home the "raw desire"
• The song is "Don't You Weep, Don't You Mourn" - it's a Negro spiritual about delivery from oppression - which makes this title ... man, I don't know. I want to say "sacrilicious."
• Wait, is this lady black? Oh, dear lord, one of the interior blurbs discusses "the power of Negro emotions ... the raw, primitive passions, the splendid crudity ..." So the Charlotte Observer observes. The New York Times approaches the topic in characteristically elliptical and ironic fashion, mentioning the novel's "great color and variety."
• This novel's approach to coding / masking race is freaking me out, frankly. Check out the back cover:

Best things about this back cover:

• "swamp girl!"
• "seething b(l)ack streets!"
• OK, Washington Times, let me get this straight: Barbarity is at the top of the arc and brutality is at the bottom? "Sorry, blacks, you may go only as high as barbarity. At least it's beautiful barbarity. Be grateful."

Page 123~

"Dis sho is good fish," he said

~RP