Paperback 100: Hold Your Breath / ed. Alfred Hitchcock (Dell 3658)

Paperback 100: Dell 3658 (1st new ed., 1963)

Title: Hold Your Breath - Alfred Hitchcock's "Stories to Turn in Your Grave By"
Editor: Alfred Hitchcock
Cover artist: photo cover

Yours for: $10

Paperback 100!!! Milestone! [sounds of noisemakers going off and balloons dropping from the ceiling]

Best things about this cover:

• It was not until just this second that I considered the head in the shovel anything but a reflection. It's such a weird photo-shopping decision, as the result is ridiculous-looking (gravity says that head would fall out of that shovel)
• If there were no Hitchcock head in the shovel, I would actually like the design of this cover a lot - words in place of head, brilliant yellow font against black background - but you Have to have the Hitchcock head; it's an icon and a selling point, like the golden arches or Mickey Mouse

Best things about this back cover:

• Yes, that Norman Mailer. Story in this book was first published when he was 18 (1941)! It was his first published story, the winner of Story literary magazine's college contest (weirdly, I knew someone who won that contest in the '90's).

Page 123~

from "Action" by C.E. Montague:

How can you tell by the looks of a man that he would not feel the point of a pin if you ran it into his thigh, or that this exemption from pain is causing any disturbance of his spirits?

~RP