Friday, May 8, 2015

Paperback 877: The Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe / Edgar Allan Poe (Pocket Books 39)

Paperback 877: Pocket Books 39 (1st ptg, 1940)

Title: The Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Cover artist: Uncredited [signature = Frye?]

Estimated value: $5-8

PB39
Best things about this cover:
  • I like to imagine the cat is drunk and smoking.
  • There's almost too much going on on this cover, but I love the whimsical font fest, and the odd color combo, orange fading into a background of steel blue.
  • Cover doesn't really convey "horror," though … unless you count the puddle of vomit where they've positioned the cat, quill, and mask. Pretty gross.
  • This book is Beat To Hell—it's my reading copy of Poe—but it's a testament to the quality of the earliest mass-market paperbacks (January 1940! Pocket was less than a year old!). Solid, square, supple, no loose pages. 

PB39bc
Best things about this back cover:
  • Master Spider!
  • "Effects" (so-called)
  • I do like the bespectacled joey-free icon, though that one-volume OED is in danger of causing some grotesque pouch disfigurement.


Page 123~ (from "A Descent into the Maelström")

Twice during six years we were forced to stay all night at anchor on account of a dead calm, which is a rare thing indeed just about here; and once we had to remain on the grounds nearly a week, starving to death, owing to a gale which blew up shortly after our arrival, and made the channel too boisterous to be thought of.

~RP

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

.. drunk on whatever that pink elixier is.

dick swart said...

I don't ever think I've seen a book cover with a blurb from 'Alf. Lord Tennyson'.

I believe he had been dead for quite a while, even in 1940.