vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
It’s been more than a year since we featured Benedetto Caroselli, the best paperback illustrator Italy ever had to offer, in our opinion. He painted hundreds of covers, all executed at the highest level. Below you see nine more. 
This cover by Benedetto Caroselli for Dammi la tua ecco la mia (“give me yours, here is mine”) features a lovely bride in a sheer mini-wedding dress. This is a reception we’d love to go to, and the line to dance with the bride forms behind us. Anyway, we’ve shown you pulped out versions of classic literature before, and this is another example. Matteo Bandello might be obscure to some, but he was famous enough in his time to have been an influence on William Shakespeare. As far as we know he never wrote a story with this title, but I Grandi Narratori often retitled classics. Oh, and by the way, a person speaks one’s “piece”, but holds one’s “peace”. At least that’s what Merriam–Webster says.
The newspaper Pravda is founded by Leon Trotsky, Adolph Joffe, Matvey Skobelev and other Russian exiles living in Vienna. The name means “truth” and the paper serves as an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991.
An obscenity trial brought against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of the counterculture City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, reaches its conclusion when Judge Clayton Horn rules that Allen Ginsberg’s poetry collection Howl is not obscene.
After a long trial watched by millions of people worldwide, former football star O.J. Simpson is acquitted of the murders of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Simpson subsequently loses a civil suit and is ordered to pay millions in damages.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson suffers a massive stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed. He is confined to bed for weeks, but eventually resumes his duties, though his participation is little more than perfunctory. Wilson remains disabled throughout the remainder of his term in office, and the rest of his life.
Ten days before the opening of the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, a peaceful student demonstration ends in the Tlatelolco Massacre. 200 to 300 students are gunned down, and to this day there is no consensus about how or why the shooting began.
A massive dynamite bomb destroys the Los Angeles Times building in downtown Los Angeles, California, killing 21 people. Police arrest James B. McNamara and his brother John J. McNamara. Though the brothers are represented by the era’s most famous lawyer, Clarence Darrow, of Scopes Monkey Trial fame, they eventually plead guilty. James is convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. His brother John is convicted of a separate bombing of the Llewellyn Iron Works and also sent to prison.
In the Philippines, an epic heavyweight boxing match known as the Thrilla in Manila takes place between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. It is the third, final and most brutal match between the two, and Ali wins by TKO in the fourteenth round.
