GOING SAILING

Nobody’s Faut but her own.

Above is a great piece of Jef de Wulf art of an amorous sailor and an interested woman for Jacques Marlène’s Faut que tu y passes, cheri!. The book appeared in 1952 from Lutécia Editions à Lyon as part of their Pour lire la nuit collection. We gather the novel was censored in France in 1955. The title Faut que tu y passes, cheri! translates to something like “You have to pass it, darling.” Here again we have a French phrase that doesn’t quite translate into English. Usually we get e-mailed about these, but our e-mailer is down, and we’re well aware of it. We’ll get to fixing that soonish, along with the pulp uploader. In the meantime, you can still contact us at [email protected] if you care to explain this title more fully.

Update: So we got several reponses to this question.

From the blog oncle-archibald.blogspot.com we learned that the title translates roughly to, “I will have my wicked way with you, darling!” This is in reference to the French expression “passer a la casserole,” which has a sexual interpretation and translates, “to have his wicked way with you.”

From our friend Jo B. we get a similar interpretation. He says it’s a way of saying, “You’ve got to make love with me, you’ve got no way to escape this… (faut que tu y passes). He explains further: In French, they also say, “Il faut que tu passes à la casserole,” which means, “You’ve got to go in the saucepan.” Strange, ain’t it ? Sometimes, we also say that for people who want to get a job (at the television, for example or in a company).

So there you go. We’re giving serious thought to learning this language. There are thousands of French speakers around here anyway, and it would come in handy. Oncle Archibald has lots of similar book covers, by the way, and we recommend clicking over there for a look.

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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1937—Carothers Patents Nylon

Wallace H. Carothers, an American chemist, inventor and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont Corporation, receives a patent for a silk substitute fabric called nylon. Carothers was a depressive who for years carried a cyanide capsule on a watch chain in case he wanted to commit suicide, but his genius helped produce other polymers such as neoprene and polyester. He eventually did take cyanide—not in pill form, but dissolved in lemon juice—resulting in his death in late 1937.

1933—Franklin Roosevelt Survives Assassination Attempt

In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, but is restrained by a crowd and, in the course of firing five wild shots, hits five people, including Chicago, Illinois Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who dies of his wounds three weeks later. Zangara is quickly tried and sentenced to eighty years in jail for attempted murder, but is later convicted of murder when Cermak dies. Zangara is sentenced to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair.

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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