Sunday, February 8, 2009

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

4 comments:

Belvoir said...

The Farmers Hotel, where apostrophes mysteriously vanish..

Anonymous said...

Charles Mannering, who changed his name to Isaac Washington when he set sail aboard the Pacific Princess...

Eunice said...

Carrie Corrupted is totally having a drink with Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong.

You know, I think more covers should have people dancing Apache.

Anonymous said...
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