Gold Medal 921 (1959)

Title : The Wife Next Door
Author : R. V. Cassill
Cover art : Uncredited

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 "They met like two comets in the night - the bored and restless man, the lush and willing woman!" - front cover. 


GM 921 has great racy front cover art featuring the title character in pink negilgee leaning against a chair. She's rendered in a Barye Phillips style, but, alas, no cover artist is credited.

Risqué details aside, for me what's most interesting about the cover design are those red, brick-like shapes sprinkled through the center of the front cover. What exactly are they? Bricks to suggest the houses of the adulterous individuals? (it's the wife next door, after all). Some sort of wacky, cubist/abstract desire motif? Or maybe a hieroglyphic code? (they vaguely suggest some kind of Mayan script). Whatever, it's all great fun in this mild example of vintage sleaze from a mainstream 1950s paperback publisher.

Site of the month

A tasty - if selective - vintage paperback sampler is posted by Annie at LifeLounge (Dec 23, 2007), Satan was a Lesbian. The unlikely inspiration is a restaurant, Thai to Go, located in Melbourne, AUS : 

  "There is an amazing Thai restaurant near me that I eat at regularly for two reasons. One: it has tasty food. Two: it has a collection of vintage smut paperback covers on the walls. So I have to credit Thai To Go for inspiring this collection of coverart I pulled together from all the corners of the WWW. It's gold guys, absolute gold. Prepare yourself for gems like, The Sexy Saucer People, Trailer Park Trash ('Their love was as mobile as their home and just as carefree'), Ball And Chain and Evil Friendship." 

Blue Murder (Dennis Mcmillan, 1987)

Title : Blue Murder

Author : Robert Leslie Bellem
Cover art : Joe Servello
  [Miami : Dennis McMillan. First paperback edition, October 1987. Soft Cover. 158 p. Part of the Classic Hard-Boiled Detective Series. Introduction by Bill Pronzini. Originally published in 1938 by Phoenix Press].  

style ***
substance ***

collectibility **
 

Bellem was the author of over 3,000 pulp stories, many of them featuring the ribald, wacky adventures of "private skulk" Dan Turner. Blue Murder features terrific retro-style cover art by Joe Servello of tough guy with smoking gun and sweaty redhead in low cut gown. The portrait of the sultry femme fatale recalls Cloutier's oily cover art for Dan Brennan's The Velvet Rut, which similarly depicts a languorous brunette veritably dripping in sleaze.

Phoenix Press, 1938

  

Dell 414 (1950)

Title : Cleopatra's Nights
Editor : Allan Barnard
Cover art : Ray Johnson
  [Dell Publishing Company Inc., New York, August 1950. First paperback edition. Dell # 414. “The Life and Loves of the Queen of Egypt.”]


style ***
substance **
collectibility **

This rare venture by Dell into historical fiction has the added crossover appeal by being a representative – at least marginally so – of that popular if not so easily definable genre of vintage sleaze. However, as was the case in so many paperbacks from the golden era, the racy promise of the book’s cover is never quite delivered in the contents.
Nonetheless, Dell 414 has much to recommend; the various chapters are well-written, even poetic, and Ray Johnson’s lush cover art balances just the right amounts of glamour and luridness, representing a nice departure from Dell’s earlier, non-realistic designs. Best of all, this was one of the last of the company’s famed mapbacks, and this map’s a doozy – the known world, ca. 30 B.C. (i.e. Middle East & the Mediterranean), “where the pagan Queen of Egypt lived and loved.” The usual suspects -- pyramids, sphinx, Paros lighthouse -- they’re all there.

Newsstand Library #U168-ASN (1961)

Title : You Can’t Escape Me
Author : John Tyler
Cover art : Robert Bonfils
  [Chicago : First printing, July 1961. 'Adult reading.' 'A Newsstand Library Magenta book.' - title page. 'She was the high priestess of evil -- rapacious and insatiable. Hell was her home, and Satan, her lover.' - cover. A lively entry from vintage sleaze publisher Newsstand Library. Cover art by Bonfils depits an upside down naked blonde captured in mid-air, presumably tossed out of highrise].


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Quote of the month

“However, the covers were sometimes printed in advance, before there was a story. So what the editor did was show me the cover or a drawing - it was usually a picture of a half-naked woman and someone stripping the rest of her clothes off her. And on that basis I wrote dozens of stories.” 
  -- Bruno Fischer, quoted in : Lee Server, Danger Is My Business : an Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines, p. 114.

Mexican vintage

Title : Mexicana : vintage Mexican graphics
Editor : Jim Heimann

Cover art : Torrero

   [Köln ; London ; New York : Taschen, 2002. "Icons" series].

style ***

substance ***
collectibility **

An irresistible, all-color collection of printed ephemera from the Golden Age of Mexican graphics [1], Mexicana is indeed a little off-topic, and not owned by me personally, but a fun discovery and worthy of inclusion for its high quality graphic art which connects it, however indirectly, to the vintage paperback movement.

The subject matter covered includes bottle and can labels, matchbook covers, cigarette packets, bullfighting and wrestling posters, travel brochures, menus, magazine covers, advertisements, and especially calendar paintings. A number of illustrations are the fetching if rather idealized portraits of Mexican women, and herein is the closest connection to the vintage paperback aesthetic of more or less the same era.

A substantial number of images derive from the travel industry, and they tend to present Mexico as a bucolic paradise of lush landscapes and Old World architecture, populated by vibrantly happy [if somewhat Anglicized] beauties dressed in Old Spain [or in some cases, mythic pre-Columbian] garb, and often accompanied by similarly traditionally dressed country squires. Fair enough – travel advertising today gives much the same message, albeit in less quaint visual language.

When a signature on the illustration is legible there's names like : Diego Rivera, Carlos Merida, Armando Drechsler, Antonio Gomez R., and Jesús Helguera – a goodly company indeed. A minor quibble is the paucity of descriptive detail for the individual items; in fact the only textual material in the entire volume is a one-page introductory summary [in English, German and French, but curiously not Spanish].

Covering much the same terrain is Mexican Calendar Girls, by Angela Villalba ; foreword by Carlos Monsiváis (San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2006). The rather significant difference is that this work has all the exquisite textual and descriptive detail, bilingual no less, which Mexicana lacked. Nonetheless, Calendar Girls and Mexicana share many qualities. In particular, both books might be described as a pleasing combination of graphic design, mythology, kitsch, cultural history and cheesecake art [2]. Come to think of it, this is q pretty good description of the qualities of vintage paperback cover art, but again, it's the cheesecakey female depictions which are the most direct connection to classic era vintage pb art [3].

The Art Deco element present but not dominant in Calendar Girls and Mexicana comes front and center in Deco España : Graphc Design of the Twenties and Thirties, by Steven Heller and Louise Fili (San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1997). It’s a tasty, wide-ranging collection of Spanish graphic design styles as employed in fashion, book and magazine covers, travel, and of course Spanish Civil War posters. Like Mexican Calendar Girls the present volume has a sprightly text and good documentation of individual items, with the illustrations being of a more abstract and purely graphic nature, lacking the emotional charge of the two Mexico books. Deco España then has a more 20th century sensibility, if you will, as opposed to the folksiness of the two Mexican titles, the images of which conjure up a timeless, romanticized, and myth-invoking nostalgia.

[1] Why does it seem that the ‘golden age’ for almost anything is the 1930s and 1940s?

[2] As Carlos Monsiváis puts it so succinctly in his Introduction, “The calendar art mixed Hollywood fantasies and Mexican legends.”

[3] Indeed, Mexican calendar artists occupy an analogous place to that of American vintage paperback cover artists; so many of the calendar paintings today considered brilliant were created in the thousands by anonymous, underpaid artists who were little appreciated at the time. But the differences were fascinating as well; the women in the Mexican calendar art, however seductively depicted, nonetheless have a natural and wholesome quality that contrasts sharply with the vintage pb’s highly stylized, urban, decidedly femme fatale look.