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.

Walter Brooks isn’t mentioned as one of the great paperback illustrators, and he probably wasn’t, but certainly this cover for Harold R. Daniels’ The Girl in 304 is dynamite. From the angled, ominous male shadow, to the stylish font, and the blue color palette with checks of red and a splash of pink flesh and yellow fabric, this one is a winner in all categories. Brooks, who was born in Glasgow, served as president of NYC’s Society of Illustrators, wrote books about painting, and designed U.S. postage stamps. And notably, he was the art director at Dell Publishing in 1958 when he was shown the work of Robert McGinnis by agent Don Gelb. Brooks assigned McGinnis his first two covers, thus helping to launch a legendary career. He also gave William Teason, who illustrated more than 150 Agatha Christie covers, his first shot that same year. So even if Brooks was not a great himself, he certainly knew talent when he saw it. This piece dates from 1956. 

Here’s a nice cover for Patrick Quentin’s, aka Hugh Wheeler’s murder mystery The Man with Two Wives, which was published in hardback in 1955, and appeared in this paperback edition in ’59. In the story, a man’s wild child first wife reappears to complicate his orderly existence with his second. His problem gets worse when his first wife’s lover is killed, and the only way he can get her off the hook is by admitting to the police—and his current wife—that he was with the first wife when the murder happened. Complicated? No doubt. An interesting bit of trivia: the flim rights were bought by David Niven, but he never managed to get the project made. The art here is by Robert McGinnis.

In color therapy pink symbolizes unconditional love, and you wear it when you want someone to be instantly drawn to you. Well, that stuff must work, because we're instantly drawn to these covers by Robert McGinnis for Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason series, circa early 1960s. We were thinking about changing our website a bit, but now that we know this about the color pink, forget it. Our traffic might drop to nothing.

Above are two covers for Carter Brown’s, aka Alan G. Yates’ thriller Who Killed Dr. Sex? Robert McGinnis painted the cover art at top in 1964 for the Signet paperback, and in 1965 another artist painted a dupe of the cover for Horwitz International’s release. You probably shouldn’t get any credit for copying work, but we have to confess we like the second version quite a bit. McGinnis is a master figure painter, of course, and his reclining woman beats the dupe, but the second version’s wall filigrees and iridescent green bed are nice additions. The other main difference is the direction of the woman’s gaze. McGinnis painted her looking slightly away, while the copycat painted her looking directly at the viewer. It’s a major shift in mood, and an interesting choice. We discussed this copying practice in relation to Carter Brown’s paperbacks before, and we assume it has to do with rights issues between the American and Australian publishers, and Robert McGinnis, but we’d love to know the details. Hopefully, more information will become available down the line. 

No, it doesn’t look like that to us either. Don’t get us wrong. It isn’t bad. But top sixty? Ever? Yet we found it on a site that included it in its top sixty, along with a collection of other covers of which we can honestly say only three were excellent. There was not one Fixler or Aslan to be found. Nary a J. David, nor a Peff, nor even a hint of a Rader. Clearly, whoever put the feature together took sixty random images off Flickr (yet watermarked the art they borrowed) and called it a day. This highlights one of the main problems with the internet: it’s difficult to know which sites are primarily focused upon providing information, and which exist solely to generate traffic revenue. A site can do both (as we try to do here with our very minimal ad presence), but when some corporate pulp site that possesses endless resources somehow misidentifies the pulp era as lasting from the 1950s to 1970s, and asserts that the term “pulp” was popularized by the movie Pulp Fiction, it’s clear that information has not only taken a back seat to traffic revenue—it’s being dragged 100 feet behind the car on a rope. We would never presume to do something as subjective as select the best covers of all time, because who the hell are we? But we have, we hope, earned some credibility over the last three years. So on this, our official third anniversary, we're going to do a pulp cover collection of our own. We don't claim these are the best—only that we like them very much. We’re posting twenty-five because we’re too lazy to do sixty, but we think all of them are winners. A few have already appeared on our site; most have not. Got better ones? Use our reader pulp feature to send them. So here we go. And thanks to the sites from which we borrowed some of these.  

Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of The Sulky Girl is one of those books that was reissued many times through the years with different covers, all quite nice. This isn’t an exceedingly rare occurrence, but the quality of the art in this case is notable. Below, we have seven examples starting with the original paperback cover from 1933, followed by excellent efforts from Muni (panel three), Dawson (panel four), Peffer (panel five), McGinnis (panel seven) and unknowns. 

Novelist Carter Brown was from Australia and illustrator Robert McGinnis was from the U.S., so it’s unclear whether the two ever met, but that didn’t stop them from becoming a dream team. Together, they produced some of the most pleasing novels/covers of the late pulp era. Below are fifteen Brown-written/McGinnis-illustrated Signet mysteries, circa 1950s and 1960s. You can read more about McGinnis (who by the way is still working at age 85) at the website American Art Archives. 

Below, nine Robert McGinnis covers for Brett Halliday’s, née Davis Dresser’s, Mike Shayne series, featuring his trademark femmes fatales, 1943 through 1964. 

Below we have four Robert McGinnis-painted covers for mysteries by Australian author Carter Brown, paired with versions created for later editions of the same books. We think all of the later, mostly uncredited, pieces are good, but that they still pale in comparison to the originals. But art appreciation is subjective, and no single opinion—most certainly not ours—is truly more valid than another. So take a look and see which ones you like better.