Short hiatus

I am going away for the better part of the week to NYC, and so this blog is on hold until then. Write-ups will resume Monday, Mar. 2, 2009.

RP

Paperback 201: Cotton Comes to Harlem / Chester Himes (Dell 1513)

Paperback 201: Dell 1513 (1st thus, 1970)

Title: Cotton Comes to Harlem
Author: Chester Himes
Cover artist: Robert McGinnis

Yours for: $30


Best things about this cover:

• This is the kind of cover I want to hang on my wall as a poster - vivid, unusual, stunning
• Love love love the 3D perspective on the preacher's hand, the Rolls grille, and the 45 magnum. Lots of great tiny details too, like the little silhouetted man about to run down the subway stairwell, or the cop caught naked with a paper bag over his head.
• In general, this style of cover art - many images crammed into a kind of composite bloc - is not my favorite. Always looks to me like it needs unpacking. You see the style a lot in late 60s / early 70s books. Here, I find the composition pleasing. Could be a little less busy, but the gun / 'fro / hand / Rolls give the picture distinct focal points and keep it from seeming like a morass of undifferentiated gunk.

Best things about this back cover:

• I really should rent this movie. Redd Foxx!? I did not know that Ossie Davis co-wrote and directed it.
• This movie is from the height of the Blaxploitation era.
• The novel has comical elements, but is also dead serious. Cotton, as in a bale of cotton (not some guy named Cotton) literally comes to Harlem. It's a long story. Needless to say, all kinds of themes of racial difference and oppression get played out in the book. It's really fantastic.

Page 123~

He didn't see anything unusual about the Chevrolet pulling out from the curb near Eighth Avenue; it looked just like any other hundreds of Chevrolets in Harlem - a poor man's Cadillac.

~RP

Paperback 200: That None Should Die / Frank G. Slaughter (Perma Books M-4026)

Paperback 200: Perma Books M-4026 (2nd ptg, 1955)

Title: That None Should Die
Author: The insanely prolific Frank G. Slaughter
Cover artist: Charles Binger

Yours for: $6

So I had an early 70s movie tie-in of Chester Himes' "Cotton Comes to Harlem" all cued up and ready to go as my 200th Paperback ... and then I went to Plattsburgh.


Best things about this cover:

• This doctor is

a. preparing to shoot the newborn at the ceiling like a rubberband
b. preparing to make "newborn tea"
c. deciding whether to keep it or throw it back
d. looking Way too long and hard at the baby's genital region, or
e. so handsome that nobody cares what he's actually doing

• I love how the mother is the very least important figure on the cover - almost like an afterthought, or a shorthand visual cue to let you know that the baby is alive and he didn't steal it.
• "That none should die, Dr. Rand Handsome ingested the mysterious, rune-inscribed baby before it could explode."

Best things about this back cover:

• "That story alone is fascinating" - uh, no, sorry it's not.
• If this description makes the book sound anti-socialized/nationalized medicine, that's because the book *is* anti-socialized/nationalized medicine. The first (teaser) page has as its headline: "President announces medical care free to rich and poor alike!" - in this book, that's the terrifying Orwellian future. Because we all know that real doctors are all driven by "ideals" (see cover), unlike nameless bureaucrats who want only to flatten all social distinctions and erect statues of Lenin.

Page 123~

"I shouldn't be saying this, I suppose, but you look like a better class of man than we usually get in a job like this, and I hope you're going to stay with us."

He added, "I mean, I'm not gay or anything, but dear god you're handsome."

~RP

Paperback 199: Don't You Weep, Don't You Moan / Richard Coleman (Lion Library LL28)

Paperback 199: Lion Library LL28 (1st ptg, 1955)

Title: Don't You Weep, Don't You Moan
Author: Richard Coleman
Cover artist: Samson Pollen

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• "We'll make our first incision ... here."
• "I'm just putting the final touches on my remarkably realistic head sculpture. . . there. Done."
• "Do those shoes look shined to you, you incompetent !@#@#!"
• Can you tell I'm just trying to think of captions that don't involve her demanding oral sex.
• This woman could be the slightly classier sister of Tombolo lady. Derisive sneer. Half akimbo stance. Tramptacular outfit. Etc.
• I love the abrasion and fraying on this cover - really drives home the "raw desire"
• The song is "Don't You Weep, Don't You Mourn" - it's a Negro spiritual about delivery from oppression - which makes this title ... man, I don't know. I want to say "sacrilicious."
• Wait, is this lady black? Oh, dear lord, one of the interior blurbs discusses "the power of Negro emotions ... the raw, primitive passions, the splendid crudity ..." So the Charlotte Observer observes. The New York Times approaches the topic in characteristically elliptical and ironic fashion, mentioning the novel's "great color and variety."
• This novel's approach to coding / masking race is freaking me out, frankly. Check out the back cover:

Best things about this back cover:

• "swamp girl!"
• "seething b(l)ack streets!"
• OK, Washington Times, let me get this straight: Barbarity is at the top of the arc and brutality is at the bottom? "Sorry, blacks, you may go only as high as barbarity. At least it's beautiful barbarity. Be grateful."

Page 123~

"Dis sho is good fish," he said

~RP

Paperback 198: Tombolo / Nicholas Fersen (Popular Library - Eagle Books EB36X)

Paperback 198: Popular Library - Eagle Books EB36X (2nd ptg, 1955)

Title: Tombolo
Author: Nicholas Fersen
Cover artist: That guy who does all the Popular Library covers whose name I just don't know

Yours for: $10


Best things about this cover:

• "See you later, lady. Thanks for all the sex. We enjoyed it."
• Least comfortable sex location ever. By a longshot. Rocky, dirty, uneven ground, surrounded by bombed out ruins. "Let's put some rebar in the foreground!" "Genius!"
• Her hand ... it's astonishingly suggestive. Is it just resting there? Going somewhere? Pulling dress down? Hiking it up? Write your own narrative.
• I love how the jolly fat guy is waving and she's got this look like "Yeah, @#$ you, you putz." Akimbo arm helps establish the defiance.
• "Not for the weak-stomached," i.e. "This book will make you barf!" Thanks, St. Louis Globe Democrat!

Best things about this back cover:

• The full akimbo!
• She has her own boy harem. Awesome.
• If you like degeneracy, this is the book for you. "Sinkhole!" "Sex and savagery!" "Thundering tide of passion and violence!" And, of course, what would a book about Italian degeneracy be without a "vicious Negro" (!?)

Page 123~

He's gon' listen to me, Emmanuel thought, and rejoiced, knowing nothing about the gin and what had happened a few hours before in the heat, in the filigree of sunshine and the strident sound-layers of insects.

If the writer is trying to make the reader feel the pain of his characters, he seems to be doing a good job. If I had to read 150 pages of writing like that, I'd be begging for mercy from God and repenting all my sins.

~RP

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

Paperback 196: Carrie Corrupted / Rock Logano (Midwood F209)

Paperback 196: Midwood F209 (PBO, 1962)

Title: Carrie Corrupted
Author: Rock Logano
Cover artist: uncredited

Yours for: $16


Best things about this cover:

• "Carrie Corrupted stars in ... 'Beige Mardi Gras'!"
• "Co-starring random sitting guy whose face is too hideous to show"
• I have a new pseudonym. It is Rock Logano. I can't even look at that name without bursting out laughing.
• I should find Carrie hot, but I just find her ... well, corrupt. Even the hint of garter belt isn't doing it for me. And the artist's gone to the trouble of exaggerating the nipple and the belly button and everything. Dang.
• "First Printing Anywhere" - suck it, Bulgaria!

Best things about this back cover:

• Customarily, "strange pleasures" involve girl-on-girl action. Therefore, I was gravely disappointed to find out that Carrie's "strangeness" is run-of-the-mill masochism.
• "More than her fair share of female equipment" sounds, frankly, horrifying. "Carrie, I don't know how to tell you this, but ... you have six ovaries. I'm sorry."

Page 123~

"The main attraction is to be the movie he made of you and those muscle boys."
"Oh no ... " Carrie gasped.

~RP

Paperback 195: Slab Happy / Richard S. Prather (Gold Medal s817)

Paperback 195: Gold Medal s817 (PBO, 1958)

Title: Slab Happy
Author: Richard S. Prather
Cover artist: uncredited

Yours for: $11


Best things about this cover:

• Wow, this is a mess. The floating / severed head seems astonished to see the Men in Black Coroners at the heart of that blue nebula. Meanwhile, Shell Scott just looks ... is that a sneer? A grimace? A leer?
• Seriously, it's like a kindergartener designed this cover. A morbid kindergartener.
• I'm not sure the middle of an autopsy is a good time to go on about your sex/death fantasies, Shell.

Best things about this back cover:

• I admire Shell Scott's writing, but this cover copy is a can of corn.
• Again with the sex/death nexus. You're creepin' me out, Shell.
• My great uncle died in the great Shell Scott fever epidemic of 1957
• "Newest" and "Latest" being the newest and latest in "words"

Page 123~

"The character you call Mr. Worthington is known to crookdom as Viper. He is a hood, a punk, a parasite on the anatomy of society, biting deeply."

~RP

PS just found this Fantastic cartoon folded up and shoved inside this novel:

Paperpack 194: One Wild Oat / MacKinlay Kantor (Gold Medal 122)

Paperback 194: Gold Medal 122 (PBO, 1950)

[For Kathy P]

Title: One Wild Oat
Author: MacKinlay Kantor
Cover artist: Willard Downes

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• "I regret that I have but one wild oat to sow for my country."
• I looked up ENNUI in the dictionary and found this picture.
• "Whatsa matter, baby? Don't you like it here in my cave?"
• Neither liquor, nor cigarettes, nor, uh, whatever Native American bauble she's playing with there, could move Louise to give Rock Handsome the time of day.
• This painting went up for auction on-line a couple of years ago
  
• Don't you love it it when booksellers put price stickers directly onto the covers of vintage paperbacks covered in delicate, easily destroyed Perma-Gloss? I know I do. (Sticker is probably removable - I just never tried, as the Perma-Gloss on the cover is virtually undamaged)
  

Best things about this back cover:

• "My dear girl" ... "abide" ... was she abducted by a randy English butler?
• I'm guessing that "Middlefield" represents the Middle-class standards of Middle America
• Love how the last paragraph reads almost like a non sequitur. So casual. Like she was contemplating hanging new curtains.

Page 123~

The scent of mulled wine was in her nostrils, the ringing of Prokofiev in her ears, as - shaking, still reluctant - she awarded herself to LeRoy for that sacred moment, and touched her face against his.

I'm sorry, but "nostrils" pretty much sucked the sexy vibe right out of the room.

~RP