The passionate embrace is a staple of mid-century paperback art, attempted by virtually every illustrator working at the time, with varying degrees of success. The example above was painted by Robert Maguire for D.H. Lawrence’s The Captain’s Doll, originally a novella published in 1921, with this Berkley edition arriving as a full-sized paperback in 1957.
Lawrence was an interesting writer. Could you call him an early sleaze author? Well, he was better than any sleaze author, but while alive he was persecuted, labeled tasteless, excoriated for being pornographic, and censored multiple times. That sounds like sleaze to us. This cover would have been an attempt to capitalize on his scandalous reputation—successfully, as far as we’re concerned.
It inspired us to compile a small collection of other passionate embraces, which you’ll find below. There are hundreds of such covers out there, and in fact we’ve already shared various kissing collections that have similar moods. But we made sure not to repeat any entries from those (we think). If you want to see them, they’re here, here, and here. Hold on to whoever you care about, but make sure they can breathe okay.
