Walk a city's streets and you never know what you'll find.
We were wandering around town earlier today, and what did we spy outside a sundries shop but a stack of vintage reading material. Wedged between English teaching books and bags of sawdust was a stack of José Mallorquí and Keith Luger paperbacks, and there were even more inside. All of which reminded us that we had posted something from Luger—aka Miguel Oliver Tovar—years ago, which can see at this link. We didn't buy any of today's pile, but we may mosey back round that way another morning and pick up a few. After all, why not? They're cheap as hell. Also, we want to know why people buy bags of sawdust, and we can only find out by going back to the store and asking. The overarching theme, though, is this: it's nice to be living in a city where we can find a bit of pulp style treasure just by taking a stroll. For years that wasn't the case.
The FBI’s ten most wanted. Above, a mix of ten covers of F.B.I. and F.B.I. Selecciones, published by two Spanish companies, Bruguera and Ediciones Rollán, during the 1960s and early 1970s. Art is by Prieto Muriana and others. Also, you may notice that cover three is modeled after a famous portrait of James Dean, and, though we aren't 100% sure, cover ten, just above, looks like it was based on Monica Vitti.
Pulp is where you find it. We’re back from our jaunt to Sevilla, Cordova, and Pamplona, and as promised we looked for and found some pulp. On a 100 Fahrenheit day in Cordova we met an antique dealer on the Plaza de la Corredera who had four crates of vintage cowboy pulps from the Spanish publishing houses Bruguera, Crucero, and Andina. The example below, entitled La Heina de Tulsa, was written by Marcial Lafuente Estefanía in 1983, just a year before his death. Bruguera cover art was often uncredited, however this one is attributed to someone identified as Garcia. We’ll get to uploading more of these later.
Wow this expensive body wash is great. Hope the missus doesn’t catch me using it. We’ve seen a lot of covers for James M. Cain’s classic 1934 pulp The Postman Always Rings, but never one quite as unhinged as this Bruguera Spanish edition. Whereas the art is almost comical, in the fiction Cain’s murderous lovers are anything but. In fact, Postman was considered so provocative for its time that it was banned in Boston. The book is short (possibly that’s why it’s paired here with Cain’s The Embezzler), and its concise story arc made it a natural for adaptation to cinema. Over the years it spawned four official film versions, and its influence is detectable in many other movies. We recommend giving this one a read, and also, take the lesson of the cover to heart and leave your girl’s fancy soaps alone.
In the future we’ll all wear jumpsuits or else. Check out these sweet covers we found. The little-known author Eric Sorenssen—not to be confused with the little-known author Eric Sorensen, with one ‘s’—wrote for the quite well known Heroes of Space series published by Spanish imprint Bruguera. We’ve seen no Sorenssen material in English, although it may be little known enough to have escaped our notice. We also know very little, or actually nothing, about who did the cover art—but it’s great.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1985—Theodore Sturgeon Dies
American science fiction and pulp writer Theodore Sturgeon, who pioneered a technique known as rhythmic prose, in which his text would drop into a standard poetic meter, dies from lung fibrosis, which may have been caused by his smoking, but also might have been caused by his exposure to asbestos during his years as a Merchant Marine. 1945—World War II Ends
At Reims, France, German General Alfred Jodl signs unconditional surrender terms, thus ending Germany's participation in World War II. Jodl is then arrested and transferred to the German POW camp Flensburg, and later he is made to stand before the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials. At the conclusion of the trial, Jodl is sentenced to death and hanged as a war criminal. 1954—French Are Defeated at Dien Bien Phu
In Vietnam, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which had begun two months earlier, ends in a French defeat. The United States, as per the Mutual Defense Assistance Act, gave material aid to the French, but were only minimally involved in the actual battle. By 1961, however, American troops would begin arriving in droves, and within several years the U.S. would be fully embroiled in war. 1937—The Hindenburg Explodes
In the U.S, at Lakehurst, New Jersey, the German zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg catches fire and is incinerated within a minute while attempting to dock in windy conditions after a trans-Atlantic crossing. The disaster, which kills thirty-six people, becomes the subject of spectacular newsreel coverage, photographs, and most famously, Herbert Morrison's recorded radio eyewitness report from the landing field. But for all the witnesses and speculation, the actual cause of the fire remains unknown.
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