We’re once again documenting the craze of mid-century publishers sensationalizing literary classics with racy cover art. Today’s example is Shame, which is a translation of French icon Émile Zola’s 1868 novel Madeleine Férat. It deals with a woman who loves her man but desires his best friend. That sounds exactly like freshman year of college to us, and in real life it was a total drag, but Zola made a literary masterpiece of it. He also achieved something no author would dream of today—he wrote twenty-one novels about two branches of a single family, tracing how environment and heredity were the overriding influences in their lives, even five generations onward, despite the various family members’ desires or pretensions to individuality.
Madeleine Férat wasn’t part of that epic cycle, and it isn’t one of Zola’s most celebrated works, though it was made into a 1920 silent film in Italy called Maddalena Ferat, directed by Roberto Roberti and Febo Mari, and starring Francesca Bertini. Ace Books saw it as a moneymaker not just once, but a second time, when it published it as a double novel with Thérèse Raquin on the flip. The pairing represents perhaps the high point of the paperback age in a way—two nineteenth century French literary classics being crammed as a double translation into an impulse purchase meant to tempt people in drugstores and bus stations. It’s insanely funny. Also amusing is that Ace wasn’t the only paperback publisher to give this book a makeover. But there’s an unfunny aspect too—Ace didn’t credit either of the cover artists. C’est dommage.
