| Vintage Pulp | Apr 27 2021 |
What's really a shame is tomorrow he'll probably tell his buddies how great he was.
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.
FranceItalyAce BooksMaddalena FeratÉmile ZolaRoberto RobertiFebo MariFrancesca Bertinicover artliterature
| Vintage Pulp | May 17 2020 |
Kiss me and I'll kiss you back.
Below, another collection of covers featuring characters expressing a little affection, a continuation of the lip locks we put together way back in 2013, and an adjunct to our collection of Harry Barton neck kisses from 2017. 
Tiffany ThayerMichael AvalloneFranklin M. Davis Jr.Von HoffmanRuth LivingstonFlorenz BranchRex WeldonRuth ParkKathleen NorrisR. G. MayzkRobert CarseRobert Paul SmithJohn DexterPeter CheyneyJ.B. O'SullivanPerry LindsayHarry BestErskine CaldwellWatkins E. WrightDon ElliottVan NizeWilliam E. GordonEdith RobertsFrank YerbyKyle OnstottLance HornerDick DaleVicki BaumNancy HaleJohn BramlettJames Ramsey UllmanViña DelmarIan Stuart BlackDana WilsonJames M. CainJohn B. ThompsonJudith HeimanGordon MerrickKim SavageDaoma WinstonVladimir NabokovWilliam FaulknerAlberto MoraviaDylan ThomasÉmile ZolaRobert WilderMartha GellhornEllen CarenRobert BriffaultAnthony ThorneTheodore PrattVincent JamesFaith Baldwincover artcover collectionliterature
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 4 2015 |
Then we’ll do flowered window treatments here, move the bed over there, and I’ll need lots of room for my porcelain dolls, and Widget’s doggie bed will fit in the corner…
French author Émile Zola gets a posthumous pulp makeover for his novel Fatal Intimacy, which appeared as above in 1960 but was originally published in 1868 as Madeleine Férat. Though Zola was a literary icon (and an interesting public figure), this is an early novel and it’s not as far away from cheap paperback fiction as you might suspect. The art is by Donald E. Green.
