Above you see a really nice Robert Bonfils cover for Bogus Lover, published by Newsstand Library in 1960. What's bogus, though, is how the author got ambushed on this one. According to mysteryfile.com, Hy Silver—his real name, by the way—originally wrote a standard detective thriller that was converted without consent into a sleaze novel. And what a conversion: “Her hips began to sway in low, rhythmic circles, eager with anticipation, then faster until they were undulating to a restless mambo beat.” Note to aspiring novelists—remember to use Latin American music as a metaphor for really good sex. The rumba works, as do the samba and bolero, and the tango is a really good one, especially when describing the interaction of two tongues. We're giving you this for free. Run with it. 

We've seen more paperback covers featuring dancers than we can count. No surprise—they are after all an essential element of crime fiction, and many of the covers depicting them are excellent. But as you might imagine, novels that feature strippers, showgirls, and burlesque dancers as characters also fall into the sleaze genre quite often, which in turn makes for a lot of low budget cover work. So we have the full range for you today in a collection depicting the kinetic art of stage dancing, with illustrations from Bernard Safran, Robert Maguire, Robert McGinnis, Gene Bilbrew, Doug Weaver, and others, as well as numerous unknowns. Enjoy.

The cover art by Robert Bonfils makes The Passion Cache look like a western but it’s actually set in the present day, or at least 1968, which is when Don Bellmore, aka George H. White, wrote the book. It deals with two fraternity buddies who go looking for twenty-thousand dollars worth of Spanish gold in the mountains above El Paso, Texas. But this is sleaze fiction, not adventure fiction, so the quest for gold is really secondary to the main character Jud’s quest to do some prospecting between the thighs of his friend’s wife Viola, an Indian girl named Desert Rose, and an eager virgin/tomboy named Sally. He’s successful on all counts, multiple times. Does he eventually end up with the gold? No, but he ends up with Desert Rose, and that’s pretty much what these books are all about. 

There's something special about how a great talent handles his instrument, right? It becomes an extension of him. A real virtuoso uses every technique in his repertoire—double and triple tonguing, lip trills, circular breathing, and of course quick valve water emptying—until it all comes together in one climactic crescendo. By the way, if you don't know what quick valve water emptying is, well child, you better ask somebody. In the past most players were men, but of late there are plenty of women who blow masterfully. The best often do dates in the legendary Trumpet City. That place is tops... Um, yeah. 1961 on this, with Robert Bonfils art. 

Above is another rare double-sided Robert Bonfils paperback cover, this time for Any Man’s Playmate and Strumpet’s Jungle, written by Rubel, aka  James Rubel, and Sloane Britain, respectively. See the first example we shared here. 

Above is a rare double-sided Robert Bonfils cover, Lash of Desire with a flipside of Pillow Tramp, from the Dollar Double Book Company of Chicago, with both covers featuring a signature—a rarity from Bonfils. G.H Smith was aka M.J. Deer, Jan Hudson, Jerry Jason, Dusty North, et al., and Hastings was aka March Hastings, Laura Duchamp and Sally Singer. The art for Lash of Desire features a confident, challenging female figure, while Pillow Tramp presents a less edgy woman seeming to offer easy pleasures. But of course, all femmes fatales lead to the same result in mid-century sleaze fiction—disaster. A lot of Bonfils’ cover output was for various Greenleaf Classics imprints during the late 1960s and early 1970s, but these efforts from 1962 show him in more conventional form. Compare them to this front, this one, and this one.

We have another collection today as we prepare to jet away on vacation with the girls. Since the place we’re going is known for rowdy British tourists (what place isn’t known for that?), we thought we’d feature some of the numerous paperback covers featuring fights. You’ll notice, as with our last collection, the preponderance of French books. Parisian publishers loved this theme. The difference, as opposed to American publishers, is that you almost never saw women actually being hit on French covers (we’d almost go so far as to say it never happened, but we’ve obviously not seen every French paperback ever printed). The French preferred man-on-man violence, and when women were involved, they were either acquitting themselves nicely, or often winning via the use of sharp or blunt instruments.

Violence against women is and has always been a serious problem in the real world, but we’re just looking at products of the imagination here, which themselves represent products of the imagination known as fiction. Content-wise, mid-century authors generally frowned upon violence toward women even if they wrote it into their novels. Conversely, the cover art, stripped of literary context, seemed to glorify it. Since cover art is designed to entice readers, there’s a valid discussion here about why anti-woman violence was deemed attractive on mid-century paperback fronts, and whether its disappearance indicates an understanding of its wrongness, or merely a cynical realization that it can no longer be shown without consequences. We have another fighting cover here, and you may also want to check out our western brawls here.

Remember those alpha covers we talked about in the past? This one can be added to that group. It’s a decidedly threatening tableau, and with the extra element of a tool taking on the role of phallic symbol. Robert Bonfils was behind this one, 1965, for Greenleaf Classics/Leisure.