Title: Queer Patterns
Author: Kay Addams
Cover artist: Uncredited
Yours for: $60
Best things about this cover:
- What's amazing about this cover is how unsleazy it is. The colors and lines are all incredibly soft, and while the picture suggests imminent sex ... I don't know, something about this scene seems sort of sweet (thus at odds with the "Perversity" allegation).
- "Queer Patterns" is an oddly unhot title. Like it's a novel about avant-garde knitting.
- This is one of my Desert Island Books ... or maybe Burning House Books, i.e. if I had to save 10 books from certain destruction, this would be one of them. It's from the dead center of my collection, time-wise (1959), it's in fantastic condition, it's a near-perfect specimen of the "lesbian fiction" pulp genre, and, well, those are nice boobs.
Best things about this back cover:
- "FRANK!"
- "NETHER!"
- That is one of my favorite opening lines of cover copy ever.
- "Reckless paroxysms of desire" — why couldn't this copywriter do *every* back cover?
- "Consoling cozenings"! Wow, that should win some kind of Ambitious Alliteration award.
Page 123~
"This is insanity," I said one night.
"Love is insanity." She lifted her head from where it had been. "Let me show you just how insane."
[standing ovation]
~RP
[Follow Rex Parker on Tumblr & Twitter]
8 comments:
Things this cover teaches me:
1) if a woman's got short hair, she's a butch lesbian;
2) butch lesbians don't wear a bra;
3) or they assert how perverted they are by - magician-like - taking their bras off before their blouses;
4) butch lesbians apparently don't wear negligees;
5) long haired, 'feminine' lesbians apparently do;
6) long haired 'feminine' lesbians mount their beds like they're climbing on a horse;
7) or like they're riding an aslant motorbike as they take a bend, (...ye', ye'...!);
8) long haired 'feminine' lesbians leave one hand out in the open to draw the eye of butch lesbians, but conceal the other hand under the sheets as if they're hiding something;
9) long haired 'feminine' lesbians also seem to use that out in the open hand as if to brace themselves for what happens next.
I must admit, this book sounds awesome.
Yes, it is sweet. The blonde has the standard seductive face, but the brunette's expression...oh, that's love.
" She lifted her head from where it had been." -
Exactly why one should never write as taught. The clause "from where it had been" is clearly unnecessary, as where else could she have lifted her head from, and so should have been omitted according to all my teachers. But the sentence as written, oh how it makes you wonder!
" She lifted her head from where it had been."
...can't make up my mind whether that's intended to make us concentrate on the issue of WHERE the head's been *wink! wink!* or the author was merely being paid by the word.
Not meaning to get "academic" here, but why was there a rise in gay/lesbian "literature" in the late 1950s? I mean in the mainstream press?
What was it about this time that got publishers to say, "hey, there is a market for this stuff"?
Great cover art by Robert Stanley
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