Saturday, October 17, 2009

Paperback 301: Behind Every Door / Julius Horowitz (Belmont L522)

Paperback 301: Belmont L522 (1st ptg, 1961)

Title: Behind Every Door
Author: Julius Horowitz
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $12


Best things about this cover:

  • Wow, the cover painting looks cool. If they'd bother to make it bigger than a !@#$ing postage stamp, maybe I could appreciate it a little more.
  • "Hey, baby, we're two tall, thin, cool people standing in the middle of the street ... the world is our oyster! What say we ..." / "I said 'twenty dollars,' mister"
  • Remade 11 years later as "Behind the Green Door"
  • Really, you're going to asterisk "The Way Between the Sexes" as something the N.Y. Times said. That's not a blurb, that's an arbitrary phrase capture.

Best things about this back cover:

  • What's that title again? I forgot.
  • "Guys who want to buy your pants ..." — I did not see that coming.
  • "The real test is when you come up against your problem." — Words to live by, if your goal is to live as vaguely as possible.

Page 123~

He saw that these kids, the oldest of them only ten, had a vocabulary of definite opinions and many of their inculcated ideas were quite opposed to his own.


Two things — one, this is a very odd, very creepy thought for a grown man to have about children; and two, I can tell from this one sentence that this guy is a terrible, terrible writer. The phrases "vocabulary of definite opinions" and "their inculcated ideas" make me wince. Editor!

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

8 comments:

Ms Avery said...

Should I ask what a "shadow dance" is?

Brian Busby said...

BEHIND EVER DOOR
BEHIND EVER DOOR
BEHIND EVER DOOR
BEHIND EVER DOOR

All so that you'll miss the fact that this is a reprint of something called The City.

Well, at least the second title is better. That said, hard to believe that every door hid moaning bastards, creeps and shadow dancers.

Anonymous said...

"Pants" = underwear, at least in Britain.

Deschanel said...

Oh, it really is a crime that the illustration is so small.
Behind the giantess and her man, you can see Bond's department store, with it's famous waterfall. Yes, those are dancing waters up there. They were gone by 1961, though. This was also the building with the Camel guy blowing smoke rings much earlier.
Interesting NYT article:

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/30/realestate/when-a-big-waterfall-was-a-sign-of-times-square.html

Eunice said...

"Guys who want to buy your pants" huh? Is this some sort of bait and switch where it turns out to be a "twilight world" book?

Random White Guy said...

Hmm... Selling your underwear brings in more than a shadow dance does. Oh, great, now I'm going to have that Andy Gibb song stuck in my head.

Anonymous said...

Here's a headline: "New York Time Disses Own City"

Anonymous said...

The last blurb really said it all: STEAMING.

Steaming pile of....