A PERFECT STORM

When it rains it pours talent.

Giovanni Benvenuti was an illustrator of unique skill. We’ve posted a couple of wonderful collections of his covers (you can see those here and here, and we really recommend them because it’s all very striking work), but have neglected him these last several years. That stops today, because he’s a top tier artist. Above you see the cover he painted for Dominique Dorn’s thriller Véronique et la St. Médard, published by Éditions Ditis for its Collection la Chouette in 1961. There’s a lot to like about this piece, but we’re most struck by the indistinct lights seen through the veil of rain. They’re suggestive but could really be anything.

Dominque Dorn, appropriately, could really be anyone. It was the pen name of Marie-Anne Devillers, who also published as Mario Ropp, Maïa Walbert, Maïa de Villers, and Michèle Vaudois. That’s a lot of names, and she used them to write a lot of books. Ropp was by far her most prolific pseudonym. She published more than one hundred novels under that identity. On the whole, Dorn churned out novels at an astounding rate, sometimes publishing six a year. That’s a lot of output, so we’ll probably run into her again. See another here.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1937—Hitler Reveals His Plans for Lebensraum

Adolf Hitler holds a secret meeting with Nazi officials and states his intention to acquire “lebensraum,” or living space for Germany. An old German concept that dated from 1901, Hitler had written of it in Mein Kampf, and now possessed the power to implement it. Basically the idea, as Hitler saw it, was for the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Russian and other Slavic populations to the east, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate those lands with a Germanic upper class.

1991—Fred MacMurray Dies

American actor Fred MacMurray dies of pneumonia related to leukemia. While most remember him as a television actor, earlier in his career he starred in 1944’s Double Indemnity, one of the greatest films noir ever made.

1955—Cy Young Dies

American baseball player Cy Young, who had amassed 511 wins pitching for five different teams from 1890 to 1911, dies at the age of 88. Today Major League Baseball’s yearly award given to the best pitcher of each season is named after Young.

1970—Feral Child Found in Los Angeles

A thirteen year-old child who had been kept locked in a room for her entire life is found in the Los Angeles house of her parents. The child, named Genie, could only speak twenty words and was not able even to walk normally because she had spent her life strapped to a potty chair during the day and bound in a sleeping bag at night. Genie ended up in a series of foster homes and was given language training but after years of effort by various benefactors never reached a point where she could interact normally in society.

1957—Soviets Launch Dog into Space

The Soviet Union launches the first ever living creature into the cosmos when it blasts a stray dog named Laika into orbit aboard the capsule Sputnik II. Laika is fitted with various monitoring devices that provide information about the effects of launch and weightlessness on a living creature. Urban myth has it that Laika starved to death after a few days in space, but she actually died of heat stress just a few hours into the journey.

1989—Los Angeles Herald-Examiner Folds

William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, which had gained notoriety for its crime and scandal focus, including coverage of the Black Dahlia murder and Charles Manson trials, goes out of business after eighty-six years. Its departure leaves the Los Angeles Times as the sole city-wide daily newspaper in L.A.

Uncredited cover art for Lesbian Gym by Peggy Swenson, who was in reality Richard Geis.
T’as triché marquise by George Maxwell, published in 1953 with art by Jacques Thibésart, also known as Nik.

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