| Vintage Pulp | Jul 10 2021 |
Is it freezing in here or are you as excited about this examination as I am?
In ’60s sleaze fiction no subject is taboo, including doctors turning examinations into sexual opportunities, as on this uncredited cover for Woman's Doctor by Lauris Haney. Sleaze fiction was a subset of mid-century literature, so one shouldn't look at covers like this as pervasive. They do pop up on Pulp Intl. often, though, because the art is nearly always outrageous, and we can't resist it. On a scale of one to ten, this one sits at about level four outrageousness. Just for reference, because you want to know, we rate this a six and this maybe a seven. We don't upload the eights, nines, or tens. At least not yet. Woman's Doctor came from Magnet Books in 1960, and was originally used in a slightly different form for the cover of Joe Weiss and Ralph Dean's 1959 sleazer Anything Goes.
| Vintage Pulp | Jul 14 2020 |
Is it just me or is our fire, like, totally out?
We've mentioned before that when you see the name Charles Williams on a book buy it. Unless it's the wrong Charles WIlliams. Fires of Youth was published by a fly-by-night imprint known as Magnet Books in 1960 and credited to a Charles Williams, but who was actually James Lincoln Collier, who happened to choose for a pseudonym the name of an actual working, thriving thriller author, for reasons we cannot ascertain. Obviously that created confusion and still does, but this is definitely not the Charles Williams who wrote such great thrillers as Hell Hath No Fury and Dead Calm. Magnet Books didn't last long, and in just a year or two was out of business.
In true pulp style, at that point a man named Don Robson, who was languishing in Her Majesty's Prison Dartmoor in Devon, England, found Fires of Youth in the prison library, retyped the entire text, presented it as his own work, and in 1963, with the help of the prison's credulous governor, managed to get his plagiarism published in Britain as Young & Sensitive. The book won the Arthur Koestler Literary Prize, which had been established to recognize creative output by British convicts, but Robson's robbery soon came to light. It's a funny story, and you can read a good account of the tale at this link.
BritainHMP DartmoorMagnet BooksArthur Koestler Literary PrizeCharles WilliamsJames Lincoln CollierDon Robsoncover artliterature
| Vintage Pulp | Oct 6 2015 |
Willing girls and wild southern boys.
We mentioned the wave of rural sleaze fiction that hit the literary scene. Well, there were so many it seems they ran out of titles. Above you see the cover of another novel called Backwoods Shack, this time by Paul Daniels for Magnet Books. This one is a bit different from the last Backwoods Shack—the last featured a love triangle, but this is more like a sex polygon. Here the spoiled and entitled offspring of important figures in a hick town use a secluded shack for blowout parties, until discretion goes out the window and problems arise. 1960 copyright.
