Vintage Pulp

January 3 2019

DEAD MAN WALKING

Reports of his death are greatly anticipated.

Octavus Roy Cohen’s The Corpse That Walked is an interesting book. A man who wants to help his fiancée with a debt takes a shady but well-paid job doubling for a millionaire investor. He’s instructed to be highly visible to press and public in Miami Beach while the rich man goes quietly to South America, where his newly rented anonymity will allow him to ace competitors out of a profitable minerals deal. The only problem is it’s all a lie. The rich man is about to be indicted for various financial crimes and faces years in prison, so he’s found a double with the intent of having him murdered. Thus freed from federal pursuit, the rich man plans to adopt an entirely new identity. Plastic surgery figures prominently in the narrative, so if you accept that one man can made to look like another, this is reasonably entertaining stuff. The copyright on this Gold Medal edition is 1951 and the cover art is uncredited.

Miami, Fawcett Publications, Gold Medal Books, Octavus Roy Cohen, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

October 20 2018

TOPs OF THE POPP

A free class in Popp art from one of the best vintage paperback illustrators.

Above, a collection of covers from the U.S. artist Walter Popp, who illustrated numerous pulps before moving into paperback art, men’s adventure magazines, and commercial package design. We’ve featured quite a bit of his work, including this cover and this one. You can be sure he’ll Popp up again.

M.S. Marble, Orrie Hitt, Steve Harragan, Stephen Marlowe, Octavus Roy Cohen, Robert O. Saber, Geoffrey Wagner, Henry Lewis Nixon, Jay de Bekker, William Ard, Gail Jordan, Walter Popp, cover art, literature, cover collection

Vintage Pulp

June 3 2016

LEFT FOR DEAD

Whew. I think I finally lost him. What a moron he is. What a klutz. What a big stupid fat balding jerk.

Like they teach you in driving class, look left, then right, then left again. Or is it the other way around? Whichever direction, you want to look a lot to avoid a potential fatality. More Beautiful than Murder tells the story of a man on trial for murder whose alibi is the testimony of his girlfriend, who was with him the night of the killing. Only one problem—he doesn’t have a girlfriend and has never seen the woman on the witness stand before. But it all starts to make sense after he’s acquitted and sucked into even more danger, including a few more killings. The main character is a guy named Steve Blake but the book is part of a series featuring author Octavus Roy Cohen’s creation Lieutenant Marty Walsh. Originally serialized in Collier’s magazine and published in 1948, this Popular Library paperback appeared in ’52, and the cover art, with its amazingly garbed Jane Russellian femme fatale, was painted by Rudolph Belarski.

Vintage Pulp

March 29 2012

STARING DOWN THE BARREL

Stop whining. You deserve this bullet and you know it.

We love vintage paperback covers featuring armed women. But we especially love them when the women are directing their attention toward the viewer. Since pulp style literature is read primarily by men, such illustrations speak implicitly about a man’s thwarted expectations, and conversely of threatened women turning the tables to become empowered. We see this above, where a beleaguered woman defends her helpless man against an enemy we can’t see because we’re living inside his body. Below are thirteen more examples of women menacing you the viewer, with art by James Avanti, Robert Maguire, Harry Schaare, Rudolph Belaski, Harry Barton, and others. Thanks to flickr.com for some of these.

Arthur Mayse, Adam Knight, Mickey Spillane, Gil Brewer, Octavus Roy Cohen, James Hadley Chase, Harry Carmichael, Ellery Queen, Alan Payne, James Avanti, Robert Maguire, Harry Schaare, Harry Barton, Rudolph Belarski, William Pearson, cover art, cover collection, literature

Vintage Pulp

November 1 2011

TOP SHELF PULP

Does this look like one of the top sixty pulp book covers of all time to you?

No, it doesn’t look like that to us either. Don’t get us wrong. It isn’t bad. But top sixty? Ever? Yet we found it on a site that included it in its top sixty, along with a collection of other covers of which we can honestly say only three were excellent. There was not one Fixler or Aslan to be found. Nary a J. David, nor a Peff, nor even a hint of a Rader. Clearly, whoever put the feature together took sixty random images off Flickr (yet watermarked the art they borrowed) and called it a day.

This highlights one of the main problems with the internet: it’s difficult to know which sites are primarily focused upon providing information, and which exist solely to generate traffic revenue. A site can do both (as we try to do here with our very minimal ad presence), but when some corporate pulp site that possesses endless resources somehow misidentifies the pulp era as lasting from the 1950s to 1970s, and asserts that the term “pulp” was popularized by the movie Pulp Fiction, it’s clear that information has not only taken a back seat to traffic revenue—it’s being dragged 100 feet behind the car on a rope.

We would never presume to do something as subjective as select the best covers of all time, because who the hell are we? But we have, we hope, earned some credibility over the last three years. So on this, our official third anniversary, we’re going to do a pulp cover collection of our own. We don’t claim these are the best—only that we like them very much. We’re posting twenty-four because we’re too lazy to do sixty, but we think all of them are winners. A few have already appeared on our site; most have not. So here we go. And thanks to the sites from which we borrowed some of these.

Vintage Pulp

March 15 2009

STOP GOES THE WEASEL

Please no! It was all her idea, I swear!

On the cover of this 1945 pulp written by Octavus Roy Cohen and illustrated by Rudolph Belarski, a cowardly man cleverly improvises a human shield out of what used to be his girlfriend. MacGyver would be proud.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

October 6

1966—LSD Declared Illegal in U.S.

LSD, which was originally synthesized by a Swiss doctor and was later secretly used by the CIA on military personnel, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and members of the general public in a project code named MKULTRA, is designated a controlled substance in the United States.

October 5

1945—Hollywood Black Friday

A six month strike by Hollywood set decorators becomes a riot at the gates of Warner Brothers Studios when strikers and replacement workers clash. The event helps bring about the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which, among other things, prohibits unions from contributing to political campaigns and requires union leaders to affirm they are not supporters of the Communist Party.

October 4

1957—Sputnik Circles Earth

The Soviet Union launches the satellite Sputnik I, which becomes the first artificial object to orbit the Earth. It orbits for two months and provides valuable information about the density of the upper atmosphere. It also panics the United States into a space race that eventually culminates in the U.S. moon landing.

October 4

1970—Janis Joplin Overdoses

American blues singer Janis Joplin is found dead on the floor of her motel room in Los Angeles. The cause of death is determined to be an overdose of heroin, possibly combined with the effects of alcohol.

October 3

1908—Pravda Founded

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.

October 3

1957—Ferlinghetti Wins Obscenity Case

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.

October 3

1995—Simpson Acquitted

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.