vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above is a collection of covers from Italian illustrator Benedetto Caroselli for Grandi Edizioni Internazionali, all referencing the concept of Hell, and the entities conceptualized to inhabit the pits therein, including Satan, devils, demons, and incubui. These were made for the terror series I Capolavori della Serie KKK Classici dell’Orrore. You can see more Hell covers at this link and this one, and in this collection.
Above: a small collection of Benedetto Caroselli covers on which he utilized orange. We put this group together because last week’s poster for Le trottoir made us realize we rarely see predominantly orange book covers, then it occurred to us that Caroselli was one illustrator who used the color often. He painted ten of these for Edizioni Periodici Italiani’s collection I Capolavori della Serie KKK Classici dell’Orrore, and two for EPI’s Agente Segreto series. You can see Caroselli squeeze another cover out of orange here.
Note: We put this collection together yesterday. Today a new monitor we ordered arrived and some of the colors that were solidly orange now look, well, red-orange. But you know what? Fuck it.
The German Air Force, aka the Luftwaffe, attacks shipping convoys off the coast of England, touching off what Prime Minister Winston Churchill describes as The Battle of Britain.
Satchel Paige, considered at the time the greatest of Negro League pitchers, makes his Major League debut for the Cleveland Indians at the age of 42. His career in the majors is short because of his age, but even so, as time passes, he is recognized by baseball experts as one of the great pitchers of all time.
Ronald Biggs, a member of the gang that carried out the Great Train Robbery in 1963, escapes from Wandsworth Prison by scaling a 30-foot wall with three other prisoners, using a ladder thrown in from the outside. Biggs remained at large, mostly living in Brazil, for more than forty-five years before returning to the UK—and arrest—in 2001.
NBC radio broadcasts the cop drama Dragnet for the first time. It was created by, produced by, and starred Jack Webb as Joe Friday. The show would later go on to become a successful television program, also starring Webb.
Veronica Lake, beautiful blonde icon of 1940s Hollywood and one of film noir’s most beloved fatales, dies in Burlington, Vermont of hepatitis and renal failure due to long term alcoholism. After Hollywood, she had drifted between cheap hotels in Brooklyn and New York City and was arrested several times for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct. A New York Post article briefly revived interest in her, but at the time of her death she was broke and forgotten.
