The unusually beautiful French language poster above was made for the Belgian run of Aladin et la lampe merveilleuse, which was originally produced in the U.S. as A Thousand and One Nights. Some of the other posters for this set-in-Baghdad musical adventure are excellent too, such as the one you see at right (presumably made for the French run), but the version at top is the best—and rarest.

The art also manages to convey the mood of the movie quite accurately—it’s ninety minutes of cheeseball musical numbers, Vaudevillian slapstick, and Cornel Wilde caught in the world’s silliest love triangle. All of this is slightly marred by the unfortunate sight of white actors hamming it up with brown shoe polish on their faces, but that's to be expected in a Middle-Eastern themed movie made during an era when actors of color were more-or-less barred from cinematic roles.

On balance, the movie is a real mood lifter, but the whole effort is just a little too stupidly sweet for us to truly call good, with a bit too much syrupy baritone crooning from Cornel Wilde (or more likely his voice double), and too much of the various love interests making cow-eyes at each other. But Evelyn Keyes as the troublemaking genie is a fun touch. She makes the movie worth it. Aladin et la lampe merveilleuse premiered in the U.S. in 1945, and played for the first time in France/Belgium today in 1949.

Above are six beautiful covers for the magazine Thousand and One Nights, which was published out of Beirut, Lebanon, a city that was once known as the Paris of the Middle East. These issues are all circa mid-1930s, when the country was under French control. We don’t recognize all the actresses, but we can identify Jean Harlow in panel two and Mae West in panel four (no big trick there, since her name actually appears in English). You may remember we shared some covers from another magazine of the same name published in Japan. If you missed that, maybe click over there and have a look. It’s well worth it. As for the Lebanese Thousand and One Nights, we found about two dozen issues and they’re all quite interesting, especially the way the logo design changes each time. We’ll share more of these down the line. 

Above is the cover of a Japanese magazine that caught our eye not only because of the extremely high quality of the art, but also because of its romantic style. We’ve had it sitting on our hard drive for a while, but decided to post it today because for some reason it makes us think of New Year’s Eve. We first saw the magazine on Mudwerks, Blonde Zombies and several other Tumblrs, but with no information as to its nature. But that’s what we’re for. We can tell you it’s called One Thousand and One Nights (the symbols translate literally as “night,” “over,” and “one thousand”), and it’s an erotic comic book with assorted steamy stories and random bits of humor. It was published from the late 1940s through early 1950s, as far as we can tell, with the latest issues we’ve seen appearing in 1951. Whether the contents are the same as in the enduring Islamic text One Thousand and One Nights, aka Arabian Nights, we can’t say for certain, but it’s probably a good bet. As a year-end note, we’re happy to say that Pulp Intl.’s traffic is up because of all of you out there, so thanks for taking time to drop by our dusty little corner of the internet. Assuming the Maya aren’t right about the whole Earth switching its polarity thing, you can expect more and better in 2012. Happy New Year.