During the 1960s the Cleveland Publishing Company, which was based in Sydney, Australia, printed quite a lot of books like the one above—i.e., World War II adventures that in retrospect are subtly racist. Well, actually, who are we kidding? Retrospect and subtlety have nothing to do with it. Even in the context of the 1960s these were overtly racist books featuring depraved and heinous Japanese adversaries putting Aussie soldiers through hell, often in jungle prison camps. We have other examples we’ll share later, but this is probably the most interesting of them, art-wise, with its devilish villain painted camouflage green. Mack Kenton, the author here, wrote many war books for Cleveland, including Beachhead, Operation Solo, Ordeal of the Damned, Fight or Die, et. al., but despite his extensive bibliography there isn’t much info on him. Uncredited artist as well. It’s amusing to imagine that both author and illustrator disavowed themselves from this dubious work, but that probably isn’t what happened. The book is just obscure. As always we’ll dig for more.

Today we have the cover and thirty-four scans from an April 1972 copy of Australia’s Adam magazine, which you know by now we collect obssessively. Because of this issue's condition it was added gratis to the last group we bought, but the inside is basically intact, which makes it well worth sharing. We have eleven more issues of Adam in reserve, and we’ve already posted twenty-nine others you can see by clicking here.

Never has a woman looked so intently serious about the feel of her own rear end as in this illustration by Robert McGinnis for Carter Brown’s The Bombshell. The book was published as Doll for the Big House in 1957, then revised and republished under its new title in 1960. Neither edition, by the way, had anything to do with glute ham raises. Signet produced three covers total. The above was the second edition from 1967. Below, in order, are McGinnis’s second effort from 1971, followed by Barye Phillips original cover from 1960, and finally Horwitz’s Aussie edition. Would this have been a lot easier if we’d just put the covers in chronological order? Perhaps, but then we wouldn’t have been able to say “glute ham raises.” It’s worth the inconvenience.

Over the last few months we’ve culled together a collection of Australian World War II and Korean War paperback covers from the 1960s and today seemed like a good day to share these with you. All of the books are from Horwitz Publishing, the family owned house established in 1921 in Sydney by Israel and Ruth Horwitz. Upon its inception Horwitz published trade journals and sporting magazines, but eventually moved into popular fiction, pulps, and comic books. It was under son Stanley Horwitz, who took over the head spot at the company in 1956, that these books were published. 

There have been many covers for Dashiell Hammett’s great novel The Thin Man. This is one of the best. We saw it on a Flickeflu page dedicated to Australian paperbacks here.

Update: A reader sent in an email not long after we posted the above pointing out that the artist copied Robert Maguire's cover art for Jack Webb's The Brass Halo. Though not completely identical, it's fair to say the second artist more or less just changed the colors and reversed the image. In fact, maybe he just changed the colors, since the reversal could have been done during the pre-press process. There are many examples of copying out there. We even dedicated a previous post to it. We also shared a collection that featured one copy in a group of eight covers. With this third example we have a mind to dig into the phenomenon a bit more. We're really curious now who the copycats are. We'll get back to you later on it, assuming we find out anything. Thanks to Miga for writing in and locating the below image.

Printed by Sydney, Australia’s Cleveland Publishing Co., The Lonely Gun was written by the prolific author who called himself Marshall Grover, as well as Marshall McCoy, Val Sterling, Johnny Nelson, Shad Denver, Ward Brennan and other names. He was in reality Leonard F. Meares, and he published an astounding 746 novels. Amazingly, he didn’t even see his first on the shelf until he was thirty-four—young for publishing one’s first novel, but not for publishing the first of 746. Or better yet—look at it this way: that’s an average of just more than nineteen novels every year until he died at age seventy-two. 

Above is a January 1978 cover for Australia’s Adam, a magazine you know well by now if you frequent this site. The art here illustrates Terry P. Duval’s story “The Final Run,” in which a hapless truck driver picks up what he thinks is a damsel in distress, but who soon shows she’s a pure femme fatale. Adam began in 1946, and this is the magazine near the end—it folded, looks like, in May 1978. Inside this issue you get the usual literary, artistic and photographic treats, including five pages of Patti Clifton shots, plus skiing Nazis, and a profile of the notorious but misunderstood Tokyo Rose, who we wrote about last year. Readers also get to visit a Dakhma, aka Tower of Silence, a Zoroastrian structure where dead bodies—considered in the religion to be unclean—are left to be sun baked and picked apart by scavenging birds, thus preventing putrefaction which would pollute the earth. Mmm. Fun! The author visits a tower near Yazd, Iran, and must have gotten there just before the government shut all such structures down permanently. Today, the only towers still used for ritual exposure are in India. So put those on your travel itinerary. And lastly, on the rear page, you get Paul Hogan in another ad for Winfield cigarettes. Forty-seven scans appear below.

Above is an absolutely vibrant cover for Charles Higham’s vampire anthology The Curse of Dracula and Other Terrifying Tales, published by the Aussie imprint Horwitz in 1962. Inside you get six stories by Theophile Gautier, H.T.W. Bousfield, Ambrose Bierce, E. Nesbit, Honoré de Balzac, and that one guy, er, what’s his name? Ah! Bram Stoker. The cover artist was Frank Benier, who was Australian by birth but Basque by ancestry and saw his first piece published when he was but fourteen. Apparently, he was primarily a cartoonist, but this is a top tier pulp painting he’s put together here. Hopefully we’ll run across more of his work down the line.