Quote of the month

"Perhaps paperback publishing's most bizarre instance of self-censorship occurred in Great Britain. Allen Lane, Penguin founder, was 'particularly affronted' by a book his company published. With a friend he staged a midnight raid on his own warehouse. After breaking in, he loaded the offending books on a truck and carried them to his farm some miles away, where they were immediately burned."

  - Thomas Bonn, UnderCover : An Illustrated History of American Mass Paperbacks, N. Y., Penguin, 1982, p. 55.

Quote of the month

"Whenever a new book comes out, I read an old one."
    - William Lyon Phelps, 'Books News and Views,' The Rotarian, March 1937, p. 43.

Quote of the month

"Columnists need obsessions, even addictions. We simply couldn’t keep turning out 900 words on a regular schedule if we weren’t allowed to indulge ourselves every now and then. We recognize that readers don’t necessarily share our cravings, but occasionally we are compelled to ask for your tolerance. Sometimes the only way to make a deadline is to ingest our literary drug of choice and report on the experience. If you read Booklist, you know what I’m talking about. My friend Michael Cart has Freddy the Pig, and I have pulp-paperback cover art."
-- Bill Ott, "Confessions of a Pulp Junkie," Booklist, v105 n5 (Nov. 1, 2008), p. 80.

Quote of the month

“Mickey Spillane is just about on the same low level of phoniness, and as far as I’m concerned just as unreadable. I did honestly try to read one just to see what made them click, but I couldn’t make it. Pulp writing at its worse was never as bad as this stuff.”   

   -- Raymond Chandler, on Mickey Spillane (letter to Dale Warren, 11 January 1952, referenced in : Selected letters of Raymond Chandler, ed. Frank MacShane, N. Y., Columbia University Press, 1981,  p310.)

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.

Quote of the Month

“Paperbacks had come into their own during and after the Second World War, and, by 1950, were like a giant money machine. Anything could be reprinted, from the classics to trashy novels; everything was given a ‘sexy’ cover and was sold like a magazine on a newsstand in the widest possible distribution. If paperbacks were once considered a way to educate the masses (Good Reading for the Millions) not much evidence of it remained. Capitalism ruled.”
  – Piet Schreuders, ‘What a Body.’ In : Sex Appeal : The Art of Allure in Graphic and Advertising Design, p. 230.

Quote of the month

“But of all covers, most potent are the crime fiction ones – largely due to the lurid lasses who adorn them. Redrawn in voluptuous detail, the crime cutie is an idealized and sexualized female. She passively poses, she exists purely to be looked at and desired.”

 – Toni Johnson-Woods, Pulp : A Collector's Book of Australian Pulp Fiction Covers, Canberra, National Library of Australia, 2004, p. 10.

Quote of the month

“Paperback cover art reached great popularity by the 1950s. It has its origins in 1930s Pulp art. Paperback books were sold as much for the art on the cover as for the story or author. When sales slowed paperbacks would be re-released with new covers. By the 1980s most paperback art had been replaced by covers with BIG LETTERING.” 
-- Paperback page, from : Illustrations-Art-Antiques

[editor’s note : this is the most succinct – 5 sentences – history of vintage paperback cover art that I’ve read]

Quote of the month

“Even if pulp fiction is still just too pulpy for you, take time to admire the covers. Damn were they cool.”

-- Bill Ott, ‘Women Write Pulp,’ Booklist, v100, n6 (Nov. 15, 2003), p.624.