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.

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.

Below, a few scans from Stag of April 1963, with cover art by Mort Kunstler illustrating Emile C. Shurmacher’s story “90 Nazis and 8 Redheads of Radar Island,” and interior spreads from Charles Copeland, Samson Pollen and Walter Popp. See two more issues of Stag here and here.

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.

Amazing Stories was launched in 1926 and was the first publication devoted solely to sci-fi. These issues span January to December 1941. Most of the pieces (those that prominently feature figures) are by the excellent J. Allen St. John. Leo Morey painted February, Stockton Mulford painted July, Robert Fuqua painted September and November, and Rod Ruth painted December. We have a hundred and thirty-three fully scanned issues of this magazine, which is pretty cool, though we’ll probably never have time to read them. But we’ll certainly share more down the line. 

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.