Pulp International

Aug 31 2014

Oh, get off the floor silly. I didn’t drain all your energy.

Above, The Love-Go-Round by W.E. Butterworth, 1962. Butterworth is better known as W.E.B. Griffin, an author who since 1960 has sold tens of millions of books in numerous genres, and notably co-authored the M*A*S*H series with Richard Hooker. The art here, which says so much by using so little, is by Barye Phillips.

Berkley Books The Love-Go-Round M*A*S*H W.E. Butterworth W.E.B. Griffin Richard Hooker Barye Phillips cover art literature

Vintage Pulp

Aug 16 2014

Mid-century fiction’s love affair with the East produced scores of virtuoso bookcovers.

It seems time for another themed cover collection, so today we’re sharing some of the scores of Asian styled mid-century paperback fronts we’ve seen. Much of the fiction here is offensive on some level, but then quite a bit of the old literature falls into that category. The art, on the other hand, is somewhat easier to look at dispassionately. So we have thirty-two paperback covers revealing the mid-century fascination with—or exploitation of—Asian archetypes, with art by Denis McLoughlin, Robert Maguire (identically on Ne-San and The Transistor Girls), J. Oval, aka Ben Ostrick, and more. Four or five of these came from Flickr, so thanks to the original uploaders on those.

Vintage Pulp

Aug 14 2012

If they were trying to avoid being remembered, they quite possibly succeeded.

Above is cover art for Nikou Dobry’s La griffe du démon, aka The Devil’s Claw, published 1956 for Editions de l’Arabesque’s Parme collection. Dobry published several other books, but it’s likely the name was a pseudonym. With these French pulp writers, that’s often the case. One website suggests Dobry was a person named Pruneyrol, but we got zero hits on that name, so a real identification may be hoping for too much. And the art? It’s signed simply M. Boero. With all the false and incomplete identities surrounding French mid-century literature, you’d almost think they were ashamed of their work, but remember that American authors played the same tricks. For instance, sleaze pulps were often written by moonlighting popular authors. The same is probably true with the French. But we will keep digging, and eventually we will unmask them.

France Editions de l'Arabesque La griffe du démon The Devil’s Claw Nikou Dobry M. Boero cover art literature