Paperback 13: Popular Library 669 (1st ptg, 1955)
Title: Sail the Dark Tide
Author: Davenport Steward (I hope for his sake that that's a pen name)
Cover artist: Unknown (looks like Earle Bergey a little)
Yours for: $6
Best things about this cover:
- The hollering guy in the SE corner: "All hands on deck! The lady's showing skin!"
- Least sea-worthy dress ever
- "I can't decide if I want to shoot someone or stab someone. Luckily, I'm prepared to do both."
- V-neck!: That guy's wearing two tons of military finery, but he could not bring himself to deprive the world of his mighty patch of chest hair
- The condition: condition is horrible, obviously, but somehow the smeary chaos seems to fit in with the action of the painting
"Hmmm, let's see. She's smoking hot and I'm a greasy thick-necked guy dressed like an extra from "H.M.S. Pinafore." Should I grab her ass or not?"I am seized with a desire to name something, anything, "Wyck."
And why is there a hyphen between "found" and "ecstasy?" Editor!
"Beaumont Journal" = least prestigious blurber of all time
RP
8 comments:
--> The hollering guy in the corner doesn't seem to have cottoned to the mood of the moment. He looks like he's having a blast.
--> "Specially abridged by the author" doesn't seem like something to brag about.
--> It takes a special person to be both "cold" AND "pleasure-mad."
--> Don't you hate it when your new-found ecstacy is threatened?
--> "...the gamut of loves which absorb all men"? Gamut? All? Wow, the Beaumont Journal was a bracingly liberated rag, wasn't it.
How can the Captain's wife be both "cold" and "pleasure-mad"?
Off-topic: I'm teaching Gay's The Beggar's Opera tomorrow.
The captain's wife conducted all her pleasure-mad business from inside a large, industrial refrigerator (even though the refrigerator had not yet been invented during the period in which this novel was set).
What the hell *is* a "gamut," and how can anything be "artfully interlaced" with it? The Beaumont Journal has me all confused now.
rp
A "gamut" is the full or extant range of...something. I think the term was initially used in music to express the full range of musical notes. So, basically the prestigious Beaumont Journal is claiming that the novel weaves together the events of the Civil War with Every Possible Way in Which a Man Can Love. I'm willing to bet that the author missed at least two of those ways and failed to express the entire gamut.
Well I guess I knew, technically, what "gamut" meant, but only in the phrase, "runs the gamut" - I thought maybe a "gamut" was a tangible object that was somehow being used in metaphorical terms in the phrase "run the gamut." ANYway... if it's related to musical notes / hexachord, then there would only have to be SIX "ways in which a man can love," and I bet Mr. Steward could achieve that. And yet I'm not willing to find out.
rp
Did he, for instance, check off The Adolescent Celebrity Crush? 'Cause that's an important one. It wouldn't be a gamut without it.
So how come you didn't comment on the Captain's mis-matched hands? The left one, presumably farther away, is larger than the one on the right--or is the problem one of proportion, given such a tiny pistol?
And...is she artistically smudged, or is that the remains of a grease-pencil marking on her leg and dress?
So what IS the title of this book? "Sail the Dark Tide" or "Down the Dark Tide"?
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