Above is another cover by Benedetto Caroselli for I Capolavori della Serie KKK Classici dell’Orrore. That’s a real mouthful, but really it just means “KKK Masterpiece Series Horror Classics.” This one, number 116 from 1969, is entitled Il vampiro and it was written by Liz Lawrence, who was a pseudonym of Franco Marotta. We don’t know if it’s the same guy, but a Franco Marotta wrote for Italian cinema for forty years, and among his work was the original Inglorious Basterds. Probably the same guy. Anyway, brilliant piece of art from Caroselli here, featuring the menacing shadow of a vampiric hand looming over a sleeping nude. See more Caroselli by clicking his keywords below. 

Grandi Edizioni Internazionali published a series called I grandi personaggi, or The Great Characters, and one of those personalities was Giacomo Casanova, the famed adventurer and lover. Looking around online, we learned that GEI printed seemingly Casanova’s entire thousands of pages of memoirs as Gli amori di Casanova broken up into small novels with pulp style covers like the one above. As far as we can tell there were (no joke) sixty-nine of these books, including this one, Il cavallo di Troia, or The Trojan Horse, which is presumably about how he secretly entered an impregnable, um, fortress. The art is once again by the great Benedetto Caroselli and we can only say that to have all sixty-nine of these with Caroselli covers would be quite a coup. If you haven’t seen the previous Carosellis we’ve shared, check here and here. In our minds, the guy is a master.

We found another I Capolavori della Serie KKK Classici dell’Orrore cover with Benedetto Caroselli art for your enjoyment today. This time it’s La perversa by Reg Sattle, aka Oretta Emmolo, published by Grandi Edizioni Internazionali in 1964. We’ll see if we can dig up more of these somewhere.

Some random goodness today, a cover for Sangre de toro (“blood of the bull”), book 109 of I Capolavori della Serie KKK Classici dell’Orrore (KKK Masterpieces Series of Classic Horror), a popular collection published by Grandi Edizioni Internazionali beginning in 1962. This entry arrived in ’68, and was written by R.C. Perez, or in reality the Italian author Renato Carocci, who inhabited an array of pseudonyms that included René du Car, Christian Busch, Harry Carren, Roland Graves, Lucien Le Bossu, James Darren, and Elizabeth Cronin. The incredible art is by Benedetto Caroselli, who, believe it or not, is a fairly obscure figure—at least if we’re to judge by the extreme dearth of info about him online. This isn’t the first time this has happened with Italian art. What the heck is going on over there in Italy, guys? Surely you must love these artists as much as we do. Build a webpage or two (actually, there is one, but you don't get a good look at the art). Well, in any case, we’ll definitely have more on Caroselli soon. We won’t stop looking until we do.

A long while ago we showed you a paperback cover that featured a painting of Sharon Tate. That book specifically used Tate both as cover art and interior subject matter. In contrast, the two figures above aren’t explicitly supposed to be Tate, but it just so happens that both unknown artists modeled their work from an on set photograph from her 1966 Dracula spoof The Fearless Vampire Killers. The photo was shot by Roman Polanski, who also directed the film. As you can see, it was used on John Dexter’s sleaze pulp Chuck-a-Lust, painted by Darrel Millsap, and on Paul Collins’s, aka Renato Carocci's giallo Ordine di uccidere, painted by Bendetto Caroselli. The former was published in 1967, and the latter in 1968. One year later, Tate was gone.

Here are five book covers for eighteenth and nineteenth century authors George Decoin, Gottfried Keller, Henry Fielding, Pedro Antonio de Alarcon, and Horace Walpole, part of a series published in Italy during the 1950s called I grandi romanzi del mondo, or The Great Novels of the World. These novels run the gamut from drama to satire, but they were all given uniform cover treatments by two artists—Angelo Cesselon and Benedetto Caroselli—in hopes that modern readers would be drawn to them. We don't know if it worked on them, but it definitely worked on us. 

Gialli or giallo fiction is an Italian invention roughly equivalent to pulp—which is to say it deals with murder, mystery, and mayhem, as well as elements such as horror and eroticism. Dean Foster’s Donne e guai, aka Women and Trouble, presents a dilemma pulp fans know quite well—that of whether to disregard a dangerous woman’s plea for help. If any of these guys had a functional sense of self-preservation, they’d walk away, but where would be the fun in that? So you know how this turns out. In life, forewarned is forearmed, but in pulp, forewarned just makes for exquisite regrets.