 She meant to cause them sorrow, she meant to cause them pain. 
We just explored Mike Ludlow's pin-up work recently and here he is in paperback mode with a cover for L. Sprague de Camp's Rogue Queen, the third book in the Interplanetarias series, with this one coming in 1951 originally, followed in ’53 by the Dell paperback edition. The text on the cover is misleading. “She learned about sex from an Earth man”? Well, not really. What actually happens is humans land on a distant planet where the humanoid inhabitants have hive-like social structures, with queens, drones, and workers. One of the workers who's a sort of liaison assigned to the humans does learn about sex, but only in conversation as she seeks to compare human sexuality with that of her own species. There's no interspecies freakiness, and it's barely even hinted at. There was really no need for Dell to try to trick readers—the book is decent all on its own as de Camp explores the geopolitical relationships between different hives, and their efforts to trick the humans into supporting one side or another in an ongoing war. Many of these books from the golden age of science fiction are high concept, dramatic but not overbearingly serious, and about at the right emotional level for a high school freshman. Rogue Queen fits the bill in all respects. 
 The first cut is the deepest. We haven’t explored the sword and sorcery aspects of pulp very much yet, so we thought we’d show you the below Frank Frazetta painting used for the covers of a 70s metal album and a Spanish language Conan book. We doubt Frazetta’s piece, titled Ice Giants, is hanging in a museum somewhere, but it should be. For the life of us we can’t see how a Pollack or a Lichtenstein is any better. But maybe we’re just crazy.
 
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1906—NYPD Begins Use of Fingerprint ID
NYPD Deputy Commissioner Joseph A. Faurot begins using French police officer Alphonse Bertillon's fingerprint system to identify suspected criminals. The use of prints for contractual endorsement (as opposed to signatures) had begun in India thirty years earlier, and print usage for police work had been adopted in India, France, Argentina and other countries by 1900, but NYPD usage represented the beginning of complete acceptance of the process in America. To date, of the billions of fingerprints taken, no two have ever been found to be identical. 1974—Patty Hearst Is Kidnapped
In Berkeley, California, an organization calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnaps heiress Patty Hearst. The next time Hearst is seen is in a San Francisco bank, helping to rob it with a machine gun. When she is finally captured her lawyer F. Lee Bailey argues that she had been brainwashed into committing the crime, but she is convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 35 years imprisonment, a term which is later commuted. 1959—Holly, Valens, and Bopper Die in Plane Crash
A plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa kills American musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper, along with pilot Roger Peterson. The fault for the crash was determined to be poor weather combined with pilot inexperience. All four occupants died on impact. The event is later immortalized by Don McLean as the Day the Music Died in his 1971 hit song "American Pie." 1969—Boris Karloff Dies
After a long battle with arthritis and emphysema, English born actor Boris Karloff, who was best known for his film portrayals of Frankenstein's monster and the Mummy, contracts pneumonia and dies at King Edward VII Hospital, Midhurst, Sussex, England.
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