Monday, January 21, 2013

Paperback 595: My Reminiscences as a Cowboy / Frank Harris (Paper Books / Boni nn)

Paperback 595: Paper Books / Boni Books (nn) (1st thus, 1930)

Title: My Reminiscences as a Cowboy
Author: Frank Harris
Cover artist: Rockwell Kent
Interior illustrations: William Gropper

Yours for: $12

BoniCowboy

Best things about this wrap-around cover:
  • Elegant. I like how the rider seems to be asleep while the horse is mid-violent-leap.
  • Are those wool chaps? They're ... puffy.
  • Charles Boni's Paper Books were an early experiment in softcover books. This book was published nearly a decade before the first mass-market paperbacks (Pocketbooks) began appearing. For more on Paper Books, see this nice blog entry.

Here are a couple of Gropper's interior illustrations:


BoniCowboyInt1
  • Fantastic woodcut look to these. Loving the bandolier and crooked saloon doors in this one. Oh, and the epic 'stache.

BoniCowboyInt2

  • That's a hell of a left. I love the victim's agony-hand.

Page 123~
Locker sent him after the younger boy to round up as many Texans as possible but before they could be collected, a bunch of Greasers, twenty or so, in number, rode up and demanded the return of the cattle. 
Well, at least "Greasers" was capitalized. That's *kind* of respectful. P.S. commas in this passage appear exactly as they do in the book, improbable as that may seem.

~RP

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5 comments:

Keir said...

The link you suggest seems to be broken

Anonymous said...

Yes, the chaps probably are wooly. There were chaps made of unshort sheepskin.

That Hank said...

Yeah, a lot of the cowboys in the northern plains wore "woolies" - chaps made of leather with the hair still on. Goat, sheep, buffalo, bear, whatever. It kept their legs warm and dry in wet/cold/snowy weather. Then that style got popular with cowboy performers, like in the Wild West shows, because they looked good to a crowd.

Rex Parker said...

Link works fine for me. Not sure what problem is.

RP

Marla said...

I think both horse and man on the cover look like they are being drawn upward by a tractor beam, in some state of extreme sedation. They are absolutely LIMP.