Paperback 197: The Farmers Hotel / John O'Hara (Bantam 1594)

Paperback 197: Bantam 1594 (1st ptg, 1957)
Title: The Farmers Hotel
Author: John O'Hara
Cover artist: Barye Phillips

Yours for: $11


Best things about this cover:

• It's @#$#ing John O'Hara and the best blurb provider you can get is Book-Of-The-Month Club News!?!?
• The design on this cover is Fantastic. It's all a bit too cramped with text for my tastes, but the pictures, small though they are, are vivid and dramatic, and the use of color blocks to build a hotel-like structure - inspired! I especially like how "John O'Hara" functions visually like a chimney and the "S" in "Farmers" is hanging out there like a rain gutter.
• Hey, is that "Carrie Corrupted" sharing a drink with Joe Bow Tie? At first I thought that she was on her cell phone, but I think it's just a cigarette.
• Is the lady with the G.I. a. dead, b. really drunk, or c. looking at an airplane flying overhead? Her neck is oddly ... unhinged.
• You really don't want to check into the Red Room. That is the lesson I gather from this cover.
• Paperback publishers must have loved O'Hara. He was a writer of "legitimate" fiction who sold off the racks and could be made, with very little fudging, to sound like a writer of soft-core sex fiction. The fifties were all about trying to get glimpses of "brief, shocking intimacy" without being called a perv.

Best things about this back cover:

• The G.I. and his lady have moved to a small cabin and are now fighting / dancing.
• Love the campy, dramatic quotation from the Times!

Page 23~ (book is only 119pp. long)

The quiet of the room was almost total, but not peaceful.

~RP