Above is the cover of the sleaze novel LSD Lusters, published by Nightstand Books in 1967. Author John Dexter was a pseudonym inhabited by a number of writers, including Robert Silverberg. Because of that, we don’t know who actually wrote the book, but we do know they’d probably prefer nobody ever found out. So we’ll just leave it at that.

Over the last few months we’ve culled together a collection of Australian World War II and Korean War paperback covers from the 1960s and today seemed like a good day to share these with you. All of the books are from Horwitz Publishing, the family owned house established in 1921 in Sydney by Israel and Ruth Horwitz. Upon its inception Horwitz published trade journals and sporting magazines, but eventually moved into popular fiction, pulps, and comic books. It was under son Stanley Horwitz, who took over the head spot at the company in 1956, that these books were published. 

Above, a cover for A. Bunch’s sleaze novel Students of Lust. No mystery what this one is about—a high school girl decides the only way to improve her grades is to seduce her teacher. It’s downloadable for two dollars from one of the great websites on the internet, Triple X Books.

There have been many covers for Dashiell Hammett’s great novel The Thin Man. This is one of the best. We saw it on a Flickeflu page dedicated to Australian paperbacks here.

Update: A reader sent in an email not long after we posted the above pointing out that the artist copied Robert Maguire's cover art for Jack Webb's The Brass Halo. Though not completely identical, it's fair to say the second artist more or less just changed the colors and reversed the image. In fact, maybe he just changed the colors, since the reversal could have been done during the pre-press process. There are many examples of copying out there. We even dedicated a previous post to it. We also shared a collection that featured one copy in a group of eight covers. With this third example we have a mind to dig into the phenomenon a bit more. We're really curious now who the copycats are. We'll get back to you later on it, assuming we find out anything. Thanks to Miga for writing in and locating the below image.

Grandi Edizioni Internazionali published a series called I grandi personaggi, or The Great Characters, and one of those personalities was Giacomo Casanova, the famed adventurer and lover. Looking around online, we learned that GEI printed seemingly Casanova’s entire thousands of pages of memoirs as Gli amori di Casanova broken up into small novels with pulp style covers like the one above. As far as we can tell there were (no joke) sixty-nine of these books, including this one, Il cavallo di Troia, or The Trojan Horse, which is presumably about how he secretly entered an impregnable, um, fortress. The art is once again by the great Benedetto Caroselli and we can only say that to have all sixty-nine of these with Caroselli covers would be quite a coup. If you haven’t seen the previous Carosellis we’ve shared, check here and here. In our minds, the guy is a master.

Sleaze covers have a way of making light of what would be horrifying in real life and this piece by an uncredited artist is no exception. It depicts the moment the main character has her clothes torn off while working as a drive-in waitress. It’s certainly a jailable offense, but in sleaze it just leads to more of the same. Based on that description, it should be no surprise the book was written by pervert extraordinaire Orrie Hitt. Writing as Roger Normandie he originally published it as Run for Cover in 1956, then Kozy Books picked it up and re-released it as Race with Lust in 1957. You can get a sense of what the plot is from the rear cover, or peruse a longer summary here. 

Her name was Europa, and three wealthy, ruthless men enslaved her—two were the almost indistinguishable brothers who went by the initials EC and ECB, and the third was the rogue IMF, he who wielded the whip, extracting whatever he desired from the helpless by threats and force. Okay, actually this book has nothing to do with any of that, but it seemed an obvious joke to make. In reality this tale of European decadence by the important author Robert Briffault is populated by a completely different cast—a violinist named Pravduski, a baroness named Rubenstein, a Russian princess named Zena, and the man who loved her… rugged Julian Bern. Actually, maybe our characters are better. Anyway, Europa was published in 1935 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, and this pulped out Avon paperback edition arrived in 1950 with the above cover and the alternate version below. We saw this for auction online asking $65, by the way. But nobody bought it. In such austere times, who could have possibly afforded it?

You see this cover for 1958’s Jack Spot—The Man of a Thousand Cuts around the internet quite a bit, especially on auction sites, because Hank Janson, aka Stephen D. Frances, is a very popular vintage author. But you don’t often see the back cover. Since we were talking about a spread-legged/phallic symbol motif yesterday, we thought we’d show you another example. The excellent art, which we found at a very interesting website here, is uncredited, so it seems. As far as content, the book is a biography of a notorious London gangster named Jack Comer, née Jacob Camacho, who as a youth became known as Jack Spot due to a mole on his cheek. Spot was quite a troublemaker, and used his knife-fighting skills and aptitude for vice to build and maintain a criminal empire that stretched from London to Tangier. Probably he deserves a heavier treatment on this website at some point, but we’ll see about that later. However, we can pretty much guarantee we’ll get back to Hank Janson, because he wrote numerous novels, and also created a character named Hank Janson who starred in some of the books, and, just for good measure, later stepped aside and let the pseudonym Hank Janson be inhabited by several other authors. Pretty convoluted, but it’s just the type of thing we love here. 

Printed by Sydney, Australia’s Cleveland Publishing Co., The Lonely Gun was written by the prolific author who called himself Marshall Grover, as well as Marshall McCoy, Val Sterling, Johnny Nelson, Shad Denver, Ward Brennan and other names. He was in reality Leonard F. Meares, and he published an astounding 746 novels. Amazingly, he didn’t even see his first on the shelf until he was thirty-four—young for publishing one’s first novel, but not for publishing the first of 746. Or better yet—look at it this way: that’s an average of just more than nineteen novels every year until he died at age seventy-two. 

Above, cover art for My Enemy, the World, first published in 1947, with this paperback edition appearing in 1953. Guido D’Agostino was a fairly well regarded writer, and this book, rather than the lightweight fare suggested by our silly subhead, was a period piece set in the 1910s dealing with an Italian immigrant in New York City seeking revenge for his father’s death and trying to reconcile his own old-world beliefs with his new life in America. You can see the back cover and more books at this Flickr set.