vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Random French goodness today, a cover for J. Effeme’s romance novel Reine de beauté. This was published by Editions de S.T.A.E.L. in 1950 with Louis Carrière on the art duties. What’s the S.T.A.E.L. stand for? Some Toulouse Artfucks Editing Lite-Porn. Well, the company was from Toulouse. The rest, don’t quote us on it.
We posted five Louis Carrière covers a while back and said we didn’t know very much about him, but we’d keep our eyes open. Since then we’ve found out a few things. He was born in Toulouse, France in 1920, into a family with an art background. He drew as a youngster but it wasn’t until the mid-1940s that he painted professionally. It happened thanks to a Greek professor at a local college who asked Carrière to contribute art to a couple of scholarly books. After that, he was in high demand as an illustrator of pulps and postcards. Apparently, he had settled into a quiet retirement by the 1980s and had no idea people were collecting his work until a chance meeting with a fan. We can certainly understand the interest—everything we’ve seen from Carrière is pure genius, including this cover of L’Inconnue dans la mer, aka Unknown Woman of the Sea, by Jean Jacques. We’ll keep digging for more info and art on Carrière, and share whatever we find.
BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.
Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.
Actress Joanne Woodward receives the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Los Angeles sidewalk at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street that serves as an outdoor entertainment museum. Woodward was one of 1,558 honorees chosen by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1958, when the proposal to build the sidewalk was approved. Today the sidewalk contains more than 2,800 stars.
Satchel Paige becomes the first player from America’s Negro Baseball League to be voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Paige, who was a pitcher, played for numerous Negro League teams, had brief stints in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Major Leagues, before finally retiring in his mid-fifties.
The Allende Meteorite, the largest object of its type ever found, falls in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The original stone, traveling at more than ten miles per second and leaving a brilliant streak across the sky, is believed to have been approximately the size of an automobile. But by the time it hit the Earth it had broken into hundreds of fragments.
