Passion Is a Woman is a Hollywood melodrama by Kate Nickerson, née Lulla Adler, focusing on aspiring but untalented actress Linda March, who hooks up with a series of men, including a director, an optometrist, and others. She eventually steals the actor husband of a fading but still powerful starlet, and has to contend with the spurned woman’s wrath. The art is from Rudolph Belarski, and the flipside of the book, posed by two models, is rather interesting too.

This fun cover of Kate Nickerson’s 1952 novel Street of the Blues, is by Herb Tauss, who wasn’t just a painter, but also a sculptor, and was inducted into the Illustrator’s Hall of Fame. He was self-taught, but even without a pedigree earned assignments with magazines as diverse as National Geographic, Good Housekeeping and The Saturday Evening Post. Later in his career he moved into fine art and did some teaching. His work is hard to find, but we'll keep an eye out for more.