| Vintage Pulp | Nov 13 2021 |
Finally! I've been waiting here an eternity for a man who looks like a success. Wanna get married?
This cover for 1951's She Had What It Takes by Kermit Welles is uncredited but it was definitely painted by Rudy Nappi, an amazing stylist, whose work is not always immediately identifiable due to the variations he showed when painting femmes fatales. The bangs and heavy eyebrows you see on this one mark her as Nappi all the way, but often his work resembled that of George Gross and Howell Dodd. We've never seen a less-than-excellent cover from him, though, and this one is especially good.
The story deals with a smalltown journalist named Jan Flowers who wants to make it to NYC, have her own society column, and marry rich. She dumps her true love Tony Bennett (not that one), jets to the Big Apple, and promptly finds every worm. The worst of her problems is probably that the cousin she's living with is consorting with a local gangster who's always in the apartment giving Jan the eye and threatening to take her by force. Or maybe the worst of her problems is the blackmail scheme she gets involved in to advance her career. Or maybe it's the employer who wants to play slip and slide and makes Jan feel that if she does he'll open doors for her.
Well, take your choice. The point is New York is can be rough on a single girl. But She Had What It Takes, while being a drama and a quasi-crime novel and a morality play about what can happen when you ride the sell-your-soul train, is also largely a romance, and a particularly saccharine one, which means things won't end up too terribly no matter what kind of bonehead decisions Jan makes. Despite the lack of real suspense, overall the book was alright. Ultimately lightweight, but readable and reasonably fun. For what we paid, we can't complain.
| Vintage Pulp | Mar 6 2019 |
A flavorful stew of mid-century paperback covers.
This post was long overdue. Most pulp oriented websites do a collection of covers that have the word wanton in the title, so we're following suit. Basically because we couldn't think of anything else to do today. Numerous examples below. Enjoy.
Lon WilliamsIan GordonKermit WellesR. Wilkes HunterDave KingLester LakeJohn B. ThompsonGeorge CassidyJames ClayfordMichael GillianJudson GreyAl JamesArnold MarmorJ.C. PerlmanLawrence TreatMartin A. LarsonHenry KlingerCarter BrownJames RubelLewis ClayCurt AldrichRichard S. PratherDrew PalmerPeter CheyneyBrett HallidayMark Danielscover artliteraturecover collection
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 12 2016 |
A suitcase and a sense of adventure will take you anyplace you want to go (and some places you don't).
As noted in the above post, we've gotten a trip together for this summer, so we thought we'd inspire ourselves by collecting a set of paperback covers featuring characters with suitcases. Just about anything can happen once you leave the comfy confines of home and we're hoping several of the scenes depicted here come true for us. See if you can guess which. Hint: not the one above—we already did that last year when we got caught in a monsoonal downpour that shut the airport on the day we were supposed to fly. No, we're thinking we want something more like the below cover to happen. And actually, that's a guarantee because the Pulp Intl. girlfriends are coming with us. Anyway, this group of covers serves as a companion set to our hitchhiker collection from last year. Art is by Robert McGinnis, Mitchell Hooks, George Gross, and others.
Paul ConnollyClyde AllisonPeter ShelleyBrian MooreLuther GordonWilliam O'FarrellEugenie GaffneyJack SheridanGerald FosterDay KeeneJim ThompsonMichael AvalloneJames ClayfordKermit WellesAnn BannonMarty HollandScott LaurenceDon BellmoreDante ArfelliNorman BlighAl HineRalph DeanJoe WeissAnna SaundersMaurice DekobraWhit HarrisonJohn O'HaraJoe McDowRobert McGinnisMitchell HooksGeorge GrossVictor OlsonJames AvatiGuiseppe Bertecover collectioncover artliterature
