Monday, June 9, 2008

Paperback 111: Stars in My Crown / Joe David Brown (Teen Age Book Club T45)

Paperback 111: Teen Age Book Club T45 (1st ptg, 1956)

Title: Stars in My Crown
Author: Joe David Brown
Cover artist: Gould K. Hulse, Jr. (I think ... he's credited with the "decorations" on the inside)

Yours for: $7


Best things about this cover:

  • "I'm your new preacher and I aim to give my first sermon right here ... even if I am jaundiced and half-drunk. Or drunk and half-jaundiced. Or dronk and half-jundiced. Point is, I got me a 12-pound Bible and this here gun, so what I says goes. Now if I can just traverse this comically high door frame..." "That's a window, you moron!" "In the name of Jesus, you better shut up!"
  • Seriously, who taught this artist perspective? A five-year-old surrealist with bad eyes?
  • The colors are so ... life-like. If your life exists only in primary colors and whatever color that guy in the corner is.
  • Our hero looks like a sickly, less charismatic Robert Mitchum.
  • What is that thing protruding from the chin of the man in the SW corner? A growth? A pouch of some kind? I want to say "beard" but ... it's got oddly regularly molded ridges on the end...

Best things about this back cover:

  • "Grandpa"
  • Why isn't this book called "Death Stalks the Parish" - it's a bit Agatha Christie, but it's a hell of a lot better than the current title
  • Teen Age Book Club: For Teen Agers who are too emaciated to read standing upright.
Page 123~

"They didn't have no lamps when Ah went to school," he said, "an' Ah reckon what was good enough for me is good enough for the chil'lun [... sic!] nowadays."


~RP

4 comments:

Miss Maggie said...

Ha ha ha ha! Bwah hah hah hah. Oh, goodnes, I'm crying...

Anonymous said...

And if I remember right (or rightly, if I'm to be in the vernacular) Joel McCrea played the preacher in what is a pretty good B movie.

Anonymous said...

Two things:

1) Hahaha it is a window! What the hell?!

2) They didn't have [i]lamps[/i] when he went to school?!? When did he go to school, the pre-cambrian era? "Well children, it seems that since it has gotten cloudy, its time to call it wraps for the day. Maybe one day one of you will invent the candle."

Anonymous said...

That should have read lamps