Vintage Pulp

April 12 2021

OVERDUE BIL’

Better late than never is our motto around here.

We’re finally getting back to paperback artist Gene Bilbrew, whose odd style, with its scantily clad women and their muscular butts has become collectible in recent years. We didn’t get it at first, but like a lot of art, once you’re exposed to it regularly you begin to appreciate its unique qualities. There’s clear intent in Bilbrew’s work, a deliberate attempt to approach illustration from a different angle, and we’ve grown to understand that his cartoonish, chaotic, often humorous, and often bondage themed aesthetic is purposeful. In fact, his imagery has become so intertwined with the bdsm scene that in 2019 the National Leather Association International established an award named after Bilbrew for creators of animated erotic art. While it’s not exactly a Pulitzer Prize, the point is that Bilbrew’s bizarre visions keep gaining wider acceptance. So for that reason we’ve put together another group of his paperback fronts. You can see more of them here, here, and here, and you can see a few rare oddities here, here, and here.

Vintage Pulp

January 17 2018

SIDEKICK ASS

Hey, hurry up, we're needed at the— Oh. I'm guessing you totally missed the bat signal.

Above, the cover of Allyn Davis’s 1967 sleaze caper Backstage Trio, published by reliable smut purveyors Wee Hours Books. In this one you get sexual doings in a touring theater troupe, with all the expected variations, including sex in exchange for funding and sex to secure plum roles, but no woman in a bat (or is it a devil?) suit anywhere. It’s a classic cover just the same from Bill Alexander, whose work we haven’t featured until now but who we will certainly get back to.

Wee Hours Books, Allyn Davis, Bill Alexander, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

February 24 2016

SOMETHING BREWING

He cooked up a different formula for paperback art.

Gene Bilbrew is one of those illustrators whose art seems at first glance below the usual standard, but he had a strong style, and the more you look at it the more you see it as the purposeful product of a unique talent. Like the work of leftfield illustrator Eric Stanton, Bilbrew’s paintings eschew realism of any sort and instead strive to catch the eye, achieving the ultimate goal of commercial art. Check out the assortment below.

Satan Press, Wee Hours Books, Vanguard Books, Wizard Books, Chevron Books, Gene Bilbrew, Russ Trainer, Ray Train, Lana Preston, Jack Vast, Don King, Hugo Paul, John Roxbury, Linda Martin, Glenn Allison, cover art, cover collection, literature

Vintage Pulp

August 1 2011

PUT TO THE TEST

Actually, you’re playing the queen of Spurta, not Sparta, but otherwise this is pretty much like the Greek myth.

So much for taking a few days off. We’ll get out of town eventually, but since we didn’t actually leave, it gives us a chance to show you Anthony Dean’s Screen Test, from Wee Hours Books, 1966. And though the cover art by Gene Bilbrew isn’t great, we like it because it shows the moment when it dawns on the actress that when her agent said, “The movie is about fifty men crammed inside the Trojan horse,” she must have misheard the last word.

Wee Hours Books, Screen Test, Anthony Dean, Gene Bilbrew, cover art, literature

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

October 16

1964—China Detonates Nuke

At the Lop Nur test site located between the Taklamakan and Kuruktag deserts, the People’s Republic of China detonates its first nuclear weapon, codenamed 596 after the month of June 1959, which is when the program was initiated.

October 16

1996—Handgun Ban in the UK

In response to a mass shooting in Dunblane, Scotland that kills 16 children, the British Conservative government announces a law to ban all handguns, with the exception .22 caliber target pistols. When Labor takes power several months later, they extend the ban to all handguns.

October 15

1945—Laval Executed

Pierre Laval, who was the premier of Vichy, France, which had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, is shot by a firing squad for treason. In subsequent years it emerges that Laval may have considered himself a patriot whose goal was to publicly submit to the Germans while doing everything possible behind the scenes to thwart them. In at least one respect he may have succeeded: fifty percent of French Jews survived the war, whereas in other territories about ninety percent perished.

October 15

1966—Black Panthers Form

In the U.S., in Oakland, California, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale form the Black Panther political party. The Panthers are active in American politics throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but eventually legal troubles combined with a schism over the direction of the party lead to its dissolution.

October 14

1962—Cuban Missile Crisis Begins

A U-2 spy plane flight over the island of Cuba produces photographs of Soviet nuclear missiles being installed. Though American missiles have been installed near Russia, the U.S. decides that no such weapons will be tolerated in Cuba. The resultant standoff brings the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of war. The crisis finally ends with a secret deal in which the U.S. removes its missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets removing the Cuban weapons.

October 13

1970—Angela Davis Arrested

After two months of evading police and federal authorities, Angela Davis is arrested in New York City by the FBI. She had been sought in connection with a kidnapping and murder because one of the guns used in the crime had been bought under her name. But after a trial a jury agreed that owning the weapon did not automatically make her complicit in the crimes.