Vintage Pulp | May 16 2019 |
Here's another interesting entry for our collection of books with "wanton" in the title—Wanton Venus by French author Maurice Leblanc, who you may remember invented the character Arsène Lupin, aka the French Sherlock Holmes. The story here doesn't involve Lupin. It's about a man who comes across a breathtaking nude statue and searches out who posed for it. He travels all over France and ends up narrowing his suspects down to four beautiful sisters living in a Mediterranean chateau. This is another one of those novels that was spruced up with new art. The original was published in 1935, and the fact that it was pretty daring for the time made it a natural for a Stateside reprinting. This Novel Library edition from Diversey Publishing appeared in 1948 and the fun cover painting is by the great Ann Cantor. You can see more from her here and here.
Vintage Pulp | Jun 26 2013 |
This cover for Maurice Leblanc’s thriller La Agencia Barnett & Cia was printed in Argentina by Editorial Tor as entry #87 in their serie amarilla, or yellow series. Leblanc was a well known writer whose most famous creation was the thief and detective Arsène Lupin, a sort of French version of Sherlock Holmes. When La Agencia Barnett & Cia was originally published in France in 1941 it was called L’Agence Barnett & Cie, with both “Cia” and “Cie” meaning “Co.” The cover is signed but we can’t really read it. Is it Tenser? Teneer? Tenger? We get no hits on any of those names, which is too bad. But the art is brilliant and we have a feeling this particular illustrator will pop up again, hopefully with a more legible signature.