Pulp International - Ben+Ostrick

Apr 3 2022

Looks like neither of us values tidiness or organization, so that's cool.

Ben Ostrick, who signed his work J. Oval, painted this 1963 Pan Books cover for Sloan Wilson's 1960 novel A Sense of Values. Ostrick was an amazing artist, with a colorful and harmonious style that Pan used to good effect on scores of covers. We wrote way back that he was British, but a few online sources say he was actually Australian. We'll dig into that at some point and see if we can figure it out. In the meantime, we have two small collections of his work, here and here. You should have a look.

Australia Pan Books Sloan Wilson Ben Ostrick J. Oval cover art literature

Vintage Pulp

Aug 16 2015

J. Oval’s style was as clean and vivid as a master chef’s.

Illustrator J. Oval was a Brit named Ben Ostrick who painted under both his pseudonym and real name. His crisp illustrations helped make Pan Books, which debuted in 1944, one of the most eye-catching mid-century imprints. Pan is still around as part of Britain-based Macmillan Publishers, which is in turn owned by the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group of Germany. Many of Oval’s pieces for Pan were paired with works so obscure they’re almost impossible to find today, but above you see a good-sized collection, including a few we managed to turn up that haven’t been widely seen. With few exceptions they all use the same formula, though he would occasionally deviate by painting a fully rendered background, or populating a scene with more than one or two figures. You can see a couple more Oval covers in our collection of Asia-influenced paperback art here, and we also shared a small collection of his work back in 2011 that you can find here.

Vintage Pulp

Aug 16 2014

Mid-century fiction’s love affair with the East produced scores of virtuoso bookcovers.

It seems time for another themed cover collection, so today we’re sharing some of the scores of Asian styled mid-century paperback fronts we’ve seen. Much of the fiction here is offensive on some level, but then quite a bit of the old literature falls into that category. The art, on the other hand, is somewhat easier to look at dispassionately. So we have thirty-two paperback covers revealing the mid-century fascination with—or exploitation of—Asian archetypes, with art by Denis McLoughlin, Robert Maguire (identically on Ne-San and The Transistor Girls), J. Oval, aka Ben Ostrick, and more. Four or five of these came from Flickr, so thanks to the original uploaders on those.

Vintage Pulp

Oct 18 2011

Tamiko looks more like a Tanya or a Theresa to us, but what do we know?

Above, five pulp pieces from illustrator J. Oval, including Ronald Kirkbride’s bestseller A Girl Named Tamiko (with its suspiciously non-Japanese-looking cover subject), and two from Sergeanne Golon’s famed Angélique series. Sergeanne Golon was actually a pseudonym for French author Anne Golon and her Russian husband/historical researcher Serge, aka Vsevolod Sergeïvich Goloubinoff. J. Oval was a pseudonym for artist Ben Ostrick, who was a major illustrator of both books and magazine articles in the 1950s and 1960s. These covers are circa late 1958 to 1962.