CLOAKED IN MYSTERY

She's always been considered a very capable woman.

What’s the difference between a cloak and a cape? Is it that capes are short and cloaks are long? Is it that cloaks always have hoods? Those distinctions don’t stand in the way of companies looking to sell the things. We found many capes with hoods in online stores that were called “hooded capes,” and we found many long garments we thought would be called cloaks but which were categorized as “long capes.” Well, whatever you call it, Rosalind Russell makes good use of it in this shot made for her 1936 drama Trouble for Two.

Russell was one of the great actresses, winning, amazingly, every Golden Globe Award for which she was nominated—five. Conversely, she was nominated for four Academy Awards and got shut out. Such is life. But she received a special Oscar in 1978 for her humanitarian work. She specialized in comedies such as the 1940 smash hit His Girl Friday, but she also starred in several notable dramas. The most interesting for our purposes is probably the 1948 murder tale The Velvet Touch. We plan to check that out and report back. 

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1901—McKinley Fatally Shot

Polish-born anarchist Leon Czolgosz shoots and fatally wounds U.S. President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley dies September 12, and Czolgosz is later executed.

1939—U.S. Declares Neutrality in WW II

The Neutrality Acts, which had been passed in the 1930s when the United States considered foreign conflicts undesirable, prompts the nation to declare neutrality in World War II. The policy ended with the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, which allowed the U.S. to sell, lend or give war materials to allied nations.

1972—Munich Massacre

During the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, a paramilitary group calling itself Black September takes members of the Israeli olympic team hostage. Eventually the group, which represents the first glimpse of terrorists for most people in the Western world, kill eleven of the hostages along with one West German police officer during a rescue attempt by West German police that devolves into a firefight. Five of the eight members of Black September are also killed.

1957—U.S. National Guard Used Against Students

The governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, mobilizes the National Guard to prevent nine African-American students known as the Little Rock Nine from enrolling in high school in Little Rock, Arkansas.

1941—Auschwitz Begins Gassing Prisoners

Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps, becomes an extermination camp when it begins using poison gas to kill prisoners en masse. The camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, later testifies at the Nuremberg Trials that he believes perhaps 3 million people died at Auschwitz, but the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum revises the figure to about 1 million.

This awesome cover art is by Tommy Shoemaker, a new talent to us, but not to more experienced paperback illustration aficionados.
Ten covers from the popular French thriller series Les aventures de Zodiaque.
Sam Peffer cover art for Jonathan Latimer's Solomon's Vineyard, originally published in 1941.

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