Paperback 795: Blood-and-Guts Patton / Jack Pearl (Monarch MA305)

Paperback 795: Monarch Books MA305 (Monarch Americana Series) (PBO, 1961)

Title: Blood-and-Guts Patton
Author: Jack Pearl
Cover artist: photo cover

Yours for: $9


Best things about this cover:

• Font makes blood-and-guts seem like kooky fun!
• Love this photo cover for how anti-celebrity it is. You can't even see his face. "Take your fucking picture. I got Nazis to kill and a cigarette to finish."
• "Swashbuckling"?! Unless he puts on an eyepatch, pulls out a cutlass, and boards a clipper, no.

Best things about this back cover:

• "Eat their entrails, you pussies! Aarrrrrrrgh!"
• I like that Monarch apparently had a "Hell on Wheels" series with a little weather-danger symbol.
• Kicking!? While the rest of the world was merely punching and flogging. Genius.

Page 123~

"Hell, I'd feel as uncomfortable without this pistol as I would without pants."

Patton then pulled a knife and smiled. "Suckers … I hate pants. Now I eat your entrails!"

~RP

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Paperback 794: Buffalo Bill / Shannon Garst (Pocket Book Jr. J-48)

Paperback 794: Pocket Books Jr. J-48 (2nd ptg, 1955)

Title: Buffalo Bill
Author: Shannon Garst
Cover artist (and illus.): Louis Glanzman

Yours for: $9


Best things about this cover:

• Bed hat.
• Three keys to killing Indians: big-ass hands, mustache wax, and fringe for miles.
• This is a pretty bad cover—a portrait-studio picture mapped onto a generic, over-bright backdrop filled with a montage of tiny, generic "action" scenes.

Best things about this back cover:

• Thanks for the buffalo-killing, dick weed.
• William F. Cody met danger early. Then he had lunch, took a nap, and went to Pilates.
• I like Yellow Hand because it sounds like a 19c. name for a nefarious Chinese criminal organization, rather than what it is—a mistranslation of Yellow Hair, a Cheyenne warrior Cody shot and scalped. "Ever the showman, Buffalo Bill returned to the stage […] his show highlighted by a melodramatic reenactment of his duel with Yellow Hair. He displayed the fallen warrior's scalp, feather war bonnet, knife, saddle and other personal effects" (wikipedia). Again, I say, dick-weed.

Page 123~

The redskins knew the country and were as hard to hunt down as the wild animals of the forest.

Everything you need to know about American attitudes toward Native Americans in one short sentence. (cc Dan Snyder)

~RP

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Paperback 793: The Roman Way / Edith Hamilton (Mentor Books MD213)

Paperback 793: Mentor Books MD213 (1st ptg, 1957)

Title: The Roman Way
Author: Edith Hamilton
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $9


Best things about this cover:

• Not sure why I own this. I mean, it has none of the sexual promise of "The Greek Way."
• Apparently ancient Rome was populated predominantly by very boring zombies who loved statuary.
• Seriously, this looks like a very badly programmed MMOG.

Best things about this back cover:

• The thing I admire most about the ancient world is all their stars were so big they only needed one name, like Cher or Beyoncé.
• What a bewitching, haunting, slightly frightening author photo.
• "… who on her ninetieth birthday was made an honorary citizen of Athens." Sadly, she did not survive the notoriously brutal "jump in" ritual.

Page 123~

Virgil sees no reason why cattle disease is not a subject for a poet.

~RP

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Paperback 792: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly / Joe Millard (Award Western AQ1495)

Paperback 792: Award Western AQ1495 (4th ptg, 1975)

Title: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Author: Joe Millard
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $9


Best things about this cover:

• Man, my brain really, Really wants the Oxford comma there.
• This cover manages to be plain vanilla and superbadass simultaneously.
• There should be a word for this style of cover art (prevalent in '60s and '70s) where different elements are montaged into one monstrous blob / human pyramid.
• Facial expressions here are all fantastic, especially on about-to-be-hanged guy.

Best things about this back cover:

• Aha, Tuco! So *that's* where "Breaking Bad" got it. Plagiarism!!
• Oh, Tuco. Why don't you come to your senses? You been out riding fences for so long now.
• This description is making me want to pull this movie out and watch it right now. My morning *is* kind of wide open …

Page 123~

Tuco lifted his own gun out of the concealing suds and shot him precisely through the adam's apple.

"When you're going to shoot somebody," he said coldly to the twitching figure on the floor, "shoot him. Don't stand around trying to talk a man to death."

Oh yeah, I'm definitely watching this Right Now.

~RP

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Paperback 791: Camera Club Model / James Harvey (Midwood F253)

Paperback 791: Midwood F253 (PBO, 1963)

Title: Camera Club Model
Author: James Harvey
Cover artist: photo cover

Yours for: $10


Best things about this cover:

• Armpit fetishists, you're in luck!
• Offscreen mystery hand preserves the modesty. I'm imagining the photographer of this picture directing the photographers *in* the picture: "Little to the right … down … perfect!"
• This is a great angle for the lower half of her body and a Terrible angle for everything else. It's all weird angles and lack of definition. Also, she looks like she's complaining about the fact that she's being arrested. Not sexy.
• Dude in background has mastered the perv-clutch hand position.
• I like how James Harvey is branching out in the kinds of models he is writing about.

Best things about this back cover:

• I prefer to take the big first word in isolation: SOMETHING! Such an intriguingly vague come-on.
• Needs to be a comma after "spotlight."
• I like how the first sentence tells us what we Just Saw On The Other Side Of This Book.
• "The odor of their combined lust" just killed mine.
• And the final bottom word, again, better in isolation. "Now let's try something really different. DIFFERENT!!!!!"

Page 123~

Betty went through her derriere poses. 

She took shadow puppetry to a whole new level.

~RP

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Paperback 790: The Big Brokers / Irving Shulman (Avon G1009)

Paperback 790: Avon G1009 (1st ptg, 1953)

Title: The Big Brokers
Author: Irving Shulman
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $10


Best things about this cover:

• Poster hanging outside the world's toughest barber shop.
• "We can do five haircuts. That's all. Five: The Wedge, The Mob Boss, The Moll, The James Dean's Dad, and the Sandy Duncan. You want anything else, keep walkin'."
• Honestly, though, this is how all pulp characters look in my mind. Exactly.

Best things about this back cover:

• Joyce has clearly seen every variety of dipshit male-kind has to offer.
• "Finally goes berserk" — oh, Bull, I'm sorry I laughed so hard at this. Please forgive me.
• Itzik has no front. Only a back. It's pretty gruesome.

Page 123~

Alex worked his way back toward Brighton and he stepped along briskly, without a worry in the world, picking up his bets: twos and threes and fives and tens, twenties, and even a fifty-dollar one from a player who was running in luck so that Alex wondered if he hadn't a secret source of dirt available to him, and while Alex walked, whistling and snapping his fingers when he wasn't destroying betting slips, his senses were alerted for shadows and cops.

Honestly, the sentence just before this one was even longer.

~RP

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Paperback 789: Having Wonderful Crime / Craig Rice (Pocket Books 289)

Paperback 789: Pocket Books 289 (1st ptg, 1945)

Title: Having Wonderful Crime
Author: Craig Rice
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $7


Best things about this cover:

• Bubbles! Wait, why are the martinis bubbling? Please don't say "that's champagne" because those are not champagne glasses.
• Also, stars! Because … because!
• I feel like Nick and Nora Charles are *just* out of frame.

Best things about this back cover:

• Wait, does that say "decapitated bride"? That's pretty gruesome for a 1940s crime comedy.
• Ha ha scare-quote *burn* on "free" verse.
• This book actually sounds kind of awesome.

Page 123~

"Yes, but the thing is," the medical examiner said again, "where is the other body, and where is the other head?"

My favorite part of that quotation is "again."

~RP

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Paperback 788: Bell Timson / Marguerite Steen (Perma Books P110)

Paperback 788: Perma Books P110 (1st ptg, 1951)

Title: Bell Timson
Author: Marguerite Steen
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $7


Best things about this cover:

• She is what I'd call "WASP-hot," though she does look a bit like she's been modeled out of Play-Doh, and those are really more flippers than hands.
• Something about her dimensions are just … off.
• This cover does not say "illicit business." It says "some lady, probably a lady named 'Bell Timson'."
• "The Sun Is My Undoing"—damn, that was gonna be the title of my autobiography! I'll have to go with my second choice, "Beyond the Pale."

Best things about this back cover:

• You said it, sister.
• "Ten years too long" made me legit laugh.
• If you named your kids Kay and Jo, you could refer them collectively as KayJo. Like, all the time. I would.
• Who is Bob and how does that relate to Bell's being a (I'm guessing) hooker? I'm really, really hoping that Jo discovers her fiancé once slept with her mom. That would at least be interesting.

Page 123~

"She was supposed to have 'touched pitch' and therefore been contaminated; you know what villagers are." Mr. Somervell laughed shortly.

~RP

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Paperback 787: The Man Who Never Was / Ewen Montagu (Avon 640)

Paperback 787: Avon 640 (1st ptg, 1955)

Title: The Man Who Never Was
Author: Ewen Montagu
Cover artist: uncredited

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• Exciting to imagine Ghost Major—riding the seas, thwarting the Nazis.
• Less exciting when you find out "the man who never was" was actually an "anonymous corpse" that doesn't reanimate or nothin'.
• This cover manages to be clever without being particularly interesting or exciting.

Best things about this back cover:

• More visual riffs on The Invisible Man theme.
• Silly Germans—Tricks are for Victorious Americans!
• "Operation Mincemeat" sounds like a WWII-themed Looney Tunes short featuring Sylvester and Tweety Bird.

Page 123~

An attempt at an immediate thrust into the area of SALONICA and THRACE need not be reckoned with.

And that's how Major Martin avoided the clap.

~RP

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Paperback 786: The Celebrity / Laura Z. Hobson (Perma Books P190)

Paperback 786: Perma Books P190 (1st ptg, 1952)

Title: The Celebrity
Author: Laura Z. Hobson
Cover artist: Owen Kampen

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• That is some grade-A bitch-glance. Not that she's a bitch, but that she appears to be thinking, "Pfft, bitches" and/or "Bitch, please. Fawning high school groupies ain't shit."
• And the winner of "Best Middle Initial" goes to …
• Surely the greatest painterly representation of folding chairs since Monet's "Folding Chairs sûr le Pont D'Argenteuil"

Best things about this back cover:

• Thornton Johns—Folding chair magnate!
• I don't know if his wife was a "loud-mouthed bitch," but those other questions don't seem very rhetorical. "Was he living with Jill Goodwyn?" Well, he either was or he wasn't. "Was he 6'2"!? Or 5'11", as his license indicated? READ AND FIND OUT!"
• Damn, "blunt" just isn't "frank." I like "blunt." But mainly it makes me miss "frank."

Page 123~

A larger life, a larger Thornton Johns. The persisting fear that something might again reduce him to the lesser Thornton Johns was a nightmare, to put it politely, of amputation.

I.e. plastic surgeons gave him a substantial penis extension and he was *not* giving it back.

~RP

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Paperback 785: O'Mara / Laurence Greene

Paperback 785: Lion 182 (1st ptg, 1953)

Title: O'Mara
Author: Laurence Greene
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $12


Best things about this cover:

• Drunk guy remembers that one time he was really drunk.
• It is my life's ambition to be a swaggering hellhound. 
• Well that's either "fear hand" or "remembering-breast-feel hand." For womankind's sake, I'm gonna go with "fear hand."
• Any sane cover artist would've shrunk Tipsy McBowtie and blown up the languorous becouched redhead.

Best things about this back cover:

• Fred T. Marsh knows from "unlaydownable." Just ask the ladies.
• Least shocking tagline of all time: "O'MARA WAS A MAN"
• "He was enormous with a woman" — but only with a woman. In the locker room: puny. Hashtag magicpenis.
• FRANK (ly brutal)!!!!! Oh, I've missed you, "frank." It's been a while.

Page 123~

Living in New York through the wettest Prohibition years, she had come to think of intoxication as a generally droll state.

That needs to be a caption underneath a picture of a flapper on the wall of some New York bar. Like, yesterday. Make it happen, NYC!

~RP

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Paperback 784: Mac Bird! / Barbara Garson (Evergreen Black Cat BC-132)

Paperback 784: Evergreen Black Cat BC-132 (1st ptg, 1967)

Title: Mac Bird!
Author: Barbara Garson
Cover artist: [Lisa Lyons]

Yours for: $7


Best things about this cover:

• I … don't know what this is. Hang on. OK, here we go—from wikipedia:

MacBird! is a 1967 satire by Barbara Garson that superimposed the transferral of power following the Kennedy assassination onto the plot of Shakespeare's Macbeth.
Thus John F. Kennedy becomes "Ken O'Dunc", Lyndon Johnson becomes "MacBird", Lady Bird Johnson becomes "Lady MacBird", and so forth. As Macbeth assassinates Duncan, so MacBird is responsible for the assassination of Ken O'Dunc; and as Macbeth is defeated by Macduff, so MacBird is defeated by Robert O'Dunc (i.e. Robert Kennedy). This action is significantly influenced by the Three Witches, representing Students, Blacks, and Leftists.

• Is he green because … Scottish people … are green?
• Love the cowboy boot / kilt combo.
• I don't remember foot-jousting in Macbeth.

Best things about this back cover:

• I like how they made it seem as if LBJ were blurbing this thing. But otherwise, just a bunch of quotes. Moving on.

Page 123~

The EARL OF WARREN, carrying the crown, stand next to KEN O'DUNC. The "Hallelujah Chorus" plays in the back ground as he speaks.

~RP

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Paperback 783: The New Pocket Quiz Book / Slifer & Crittenden (Pocket Books 255)

Paperback 783: Pocket Books 255 (1st ptg, 1943)

Title: The New Pocket Quiz Book
Authors: Rosejeanne Slifer and Louise Crittenden
Cover artist: I doubt it

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• Well … is it the New Pocket Quiz Book or not?? Do I have to guess? I guess Yes.
• Why don't these ladies get their first names on the cover? I BLAME THE PATRIARCHY!
• If you enjoy WWII-era trivia, this is the book for you. Question: "In flying, which is the stronger tendency, to climb or to dive?" I would've thought that depended on your mood / sanity. Interesting.

Best things about this back cover:

• I like this cover's predilection for lively phrases like "Bone up!" and "Quiz-whiz!"
• "Do not under any circumstances send this to a girl in the armed forces. Anywhere."
• I don't remember seeing this exact Pocket Books logo before. The joey acts as a kind of book stand. Levenger should be all over that.

Page 123~

Who ran and ran and ran but never became president?

Answer: Jesse Owens

~RP

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