Paperback 1146: Sexbound / Dean McCoy (Beacon B460F)

Paperback 1146: Beacon B460F (PBO, 1961)

Title: Sexbound

Author: Dean McCoy

Cover artist: Uncredited [Clement Micarelli]

Condition: 6.5/10

Value: $12-15

[Autumn Leaves, Ithaca NY, Aug. 2025]

Best things about this cover: 

• This novel combines two things I love: motels and frankness.
• Not just "frank"—"WHOLLY FRANK." No partial frankness here, nosiree. You get the whole frank and nothing but the frank. 
• Sexbound! It's a play on "snowbound." Get it? Like when you're trapped in a motel because of the sex storm outside. Only it's a sex storm inside, and your extremely lifelike partner has her head awkwardly propped up by a giant pillow while she chews her nails, sexily. That kind of "sexbound."
• If you ignore her hands, and her head, and the fact that she looks like she fell into this position from a great height, this is great girl art (GGA).
• A sleazy book in a sleazy condition. Very well read. Solid, with a tight spine, but with lots of edge wear and mild creasing. Some grime. This book looks like I imagine this motel feels. Like, is it sexy, or is it just ... dirty?
• "Grappling with the problems of infidelity created by America's roadside inns"—I love when sleaze poses as a public service message. "You'll definitely want to read this in order to stay informed about one of the great social ills of our day and definitely not because it will mildly arouse you while you are unsexbound in your sad and lonely motel room."

Best things about this back cover: 

• Some take the low road, and some take ... the blow road ('cause of the snow! the snow, I mean! Look at it blowing there in that ridiculously small sketch)
• "Excuse me, I'm lost. Could you tell me how to get to Lydia Lane?"
• "No, not Barbara!," I imagine someone exclaiming as they read this. Someone who knows Barbara from, like, PTA meetings.
• "It remained for the lush waitress, Vinnie, to pick up the pieces." Surely one of the great pieces of back cover copy. Poetic in its ridiculousness, or vice versa.
• Again with the FRANKness, and again with the public service announcement: "Read this book so that you may learn (in detail!) the perils of fucking strangers in roadside inns!"

Page 123~

When he had poured whiskey into glasses, he said, "Here's to the mating of my Porsche with your T-bird."

There's euphemism, and then there's whatever this is. "So you're gonna put your car in my ... car? I think you've had enough whiskey, big boy."

~RP

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Paperback 1131: The Company She Keeps / Mary McCarthy (Dell 824)

Paperback 1131: Dell 824 (1st ptg, 1955)

Title: The Company She Keeps

Author: Mary McCarthy

Cover artist: Robert Maguire

Condition: 7/10

Value: $10

[Newest addition to the Doug Peterson Collection]

Best things about this cover: 

• I took one look at this and said "Maguire" so fast, I surprised even myself. Utter certainty. The guy had a style, and that style was Quintessential GGA (Great Girl Art). Robert McGinnis has probably the most recognizable style of all paperback cover artists, but for me, Bob Maguire is undefeated. Best of the best. He doesn't even have a lot of room to do his magic here, and yet that face, those lips, those (perfect) hands—unmistakable.
• Every time I look at this cover—every single time—I see an empty coupe glass in her right hand. And then I see that it's just an illusion created by the corner of the train (?) window behind her—an illusion reinforced by the bottle of booze on the ledge behind her.
• Just put some a cigarette, some booze, and a world-weary dame on your cover and I am happy. If she's on a train, even better.
• I love how paperbacks sexed up everything by the mid-50s, even "literary" fiction like this. Mary McCarthy is not exactly slinging sleaze, but there's no reason she can't look like she is. There are very few books that could be improved, looks-wise, by The Maguire Treatment.

Best things about this back cover: 

• She's like the antithesis of the woman on the cover, all brightness and smiles. She seems lovely, but I yearn for the down-and-outness of the flip side of this book.
• "Writes like a man"—ugh, these midcentury critics who are still startled to find a woman writer who is good and also frank about sex. Speaking of frank ...
• "Frank!" My favorite cover copy adjective. Feels like it's been a long time since I've seen "frank." I have a "Frank" tag for this blog and everything. Welcome back, old friend. I love "frank" because it's like the book's winking at you, like "psst ... it's dirty, c'mon, read it! You know you wanna..."

Page 123~

He made you think of Boy Scouts and starting a fire without matches and Wesley Barry and skinning the cat and Our Gang comedies and Huckleberry Finn. If he had ever been hard up, he could have been a photographic model, and one could have seen his pleasant, vaguely troubled face more often in The Saturday Evening Post than in Esquire. He might have done well as the young man who is worried about his life insurance, the young man who is worried about dandruff, the young man whose shirts won't fit him, the young man who looks up happily from his plate of Crunchies, saying, "Gee, honey, I didn't know breakfast food could taste so good!"

Frankly, this is great. It goes on like this (the chapter is called "Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man"), and it doesn't get worse. I've never read McCarthy before, but I might have to give her a try.

~RP

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Paperback 1097: A Holiday for Murder / Agatha Christie (Bantam 20968-X)

 Paperback 1097: Bantam 20968-X (28th ptg, 1980)

Title: A Holiday for Murder

Author: Agatha Christie

Cover artist: Tom Adams

Condition: 8/10

Value: $8

[Little Free Library outside the cafe I go to on Sundays]

Best things about this cover: 

• Look at this freak show. God I love weird covers. "What if the screaming head of Ebenezer Scrooge were flying through the air just bleeding holly berries, his voice shattering a wine glass that happens to be nearby for some reason?" "... That's it?" "Uh, no, no ... there's ... there's also a chair!" "Hmmm..." "And a statue!" "OK, sold!" 
• The great thing about Christie (well, one of them) is that she was such a guaranteed seller, such a book-moving juggernaut, that you could collect *only* Christie paperbacks and have no hope of ever "completing" your collection. And her career traverses all of paperback cover styles. She's a design universe unto herself.
• Murder for Christmas is better, not sure what they think they're doing on the retitle here.
• I pulled four Christies from the LFL (Little Free Library) outside Batch Coffee in Binghamton—that's the other great thing about Christie: like Gardner, her books are Everywhere. I read an early one, The Secret of Chimneys (1925), which featured not Poirot or Marple but someone named Superintendent Battle. He was a recurring character, appearing in five (!) of her novels between '25 and '44. The book was genuinely hilarious, closer to slapstick than most conventional  detective fiction. I honestly don't remember Christie being that funny. In fact, I recently read the much later At Bertram's Hotel, and it wasn't that funny. Funnyish, but nothing like the whizbang near-goofiness of The Secret of Chimneys.

Best things about this back cover: 

• "Violent Night, Holey Night" ('cause you're full of holes ... from all the bullets or stab wounds ... OK, OK, I'll work on it)
• Cannot believe they're just wasting all this valuable space. Why not make the font big and stupid, or add some of the old man's dumb kids? Something, anything. You can't get visually upstaged by barcodes, man! Come on.

Page 123~

"Perhaps it is better to speak frankly.”

It is the formal position of this blog that it is always better to do Everything "frankly." 

~RP

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Paperback 1056: In Case of Emergency / Georges Simenon (Dell D279)

Paperback 1056: Dell D279 (1st Dell, 1959)

Title: In Case of Emergency
Author: Georges Simenon
Cover artist: photo

Condition: 7/10
Estimated value: $10-15

Best things about this cover:

• If anything was gonna kickstart this blog again, it was gonna be a sudden jolt of "frank"ness (picked this up on Sunday at Autumn Leaves bookstore in Ithaca)
• Is there another way to be "shocking" besides "frankly shocking"? Can you be "coyly shocking"?
• I know there is the suggestion of titillation inside ("8 PAGES OF PHOTOGRAPHS") but you'd think they would've offered up a more (frankly) suggestive shot of Bardot for the cover. Yes, she appears to be naked and in bed, but it's really a rather dull still—as if she were merely eyeing the cover copy and thinking, "yeah, I guess that's OK."
• I want to live in a world where promises of JEAN GABIN photos could move books

Best things about this back cover: 

• "Thoughts of Jean Gabin invaded her mind like ... well, like this red arrow!"
• Yes, "obsessed" with his mistress, we get it, you said that on the cover, come on, thesaurus!
• Nevermind, I just finished reading that first paragraph, put the thesauraus down, I repeat, put the thesaurus down, step away from the adjectives, please
• I know "little slut of the streets" is supposed to sound insulting but I think it's kind of cute ... also, maybe your "traitorous body" is your own problem, pal
• "Degrading," "depravity," "destruction," "desires" ... how about "desist" or "depart the D section of your dictionary, dude"?

Page 123~

"You'll see! She's got a pretty little pussy, with real blonde hair."

OK so that "pussy" is not I repeat not a cat. Frankly, I'm shocked. No, I'm being *real* frank, not boy-who-cried-frank frank. This quotation seems ... well, as explicit as anything I've ever seen in a book from a mainstream 1950s paperback publisher. I guess the French get more leeway. You know how they are.

~RP

Paperback 1002: Naked in Paris / Zack Robertts (Carousel 513)

Paperback 1002: Carousel Books 513 (PBO, 1962)

Title: Naked in Paris
Author: Zack Robertts
Cover artist: cheap-ass photographer

Condition: 7/10
Estimated value: $12-15

[Newest addition to the Doug Peterson Collection]

Best things about this cover:

• Super-hot top and chair totally undermined by world's most disgusting carpet remnant
• Nice gams, tho
• I like how she's carefully posed but also looks Completely surprised someone is taking her picture. "I'm just gonna enjoy a little after-party time with my favorite carpet remnant and ... oh! A photographer! I didn't see you there!"
• Zack Robertts—the extra T is for "titillation"! (is what I assume his business cards said)

Best things about this back cover:

• Hell yeah, it's frank! All the best stories are frank! Frank!
• Modern love = sex in this mid-century butterfly chair—bonne chance!
• "World capitals," LOL. "Which ones?" "Some of them!"

Page123~

It wasn't exactly as I had planned and dreamed it over many months, but it was only for a brief stopover, but I was going home. And I felt pretty good about it.

But I don't feel pretty good about that first sentence, but what do I know?

~RP

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Paperback 447: Queer Patterns / Kay Addams (Beacon B259)

Paperback 447: Beacon Books B259 (PBO, 1959)

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

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Paperback 420: Smoldering Women / Burton St. John (Beacon B585F)

Paperback 420: Beacon B585F (PBO, 1963)

Title: Smoldering Women
Author: Burton St. John
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $30


Best things about this cover:

• Everything pales before the righteous name of Burton St. John.
• I think the cover artist took the title a bit too literally—I can barely see the strangely posed women and their amorphous underthings for all the smoke.
• "Hey Judy, do you smell smoke? [sniff, sniff] Hmm, it's not coming from my armpits ..."
  
• Wow, that tagline doesn't mess around. It gets right down to business. Between "bizarre" and "depraved" ... and the mother pimping her daughters in a burning building ... this cover is failing at its putative goal of turning me on.

Best things about this back cover:

• "Jessica was FRANK!" — dingdingdingding. Add another to the "frank" collection ...
  
• So the mom isn't whoring out her daughters so much as offering them up as subjects of quasi-medical experimentation. If clinically treating a frigid woman and her nymphomaniac sister is really what "most men dream about," then the "stunning answer" to the question "What is really abnormal?" is "me." I've never dreamed about those two in my life.
  

I just read the last page of this book. It involves a white man telling a black girl to give up on her dream of being his lover, advising her to marry the (black) "stable boy," but then fucking her anyway. So, instead of Page 123, I give you Page 151:

A beam of sun laid a spear of gold across her breast. He stepped toward her. They came together in a bursting flood of delight.

The End. So either they fucked or they detonated themselves in some kind of suicide pact.

P.S. "A beam of sun laid a spear of gold" should be arrested for crimes against metaphor.

~RP

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Paperback 416: Sex For One / Harvey T. Leathem with Hugh Jones (Century Books 036)

Paperback 416: Century Books 036 (PBO, 1967)

Title: Sex For One
Author: Harvey T. Leathem with Hugh Jones
Cover artist: —

Yours for: $10


Best things about this cover:

• "Frank"!
• Yes, if you are going to masturbate, by all means, do it behind a curtain of silence. I'm trying to work over here!
• Puzzled by the little logo in the "O" (nice!). Is the real title "Sex For One Pouty-Lipped Woman"?

Best things about this back cover:

• Oh, I'm sorry, *Dr.* Harvey T. Leathem.
• "... during his years of practice" is the best adverbial phrase ever. "I've been jacking off for years, and let me tell you..."
• Does he also discuss his hyphen fetish?
• I love the ALL-CAPS ORANGE QUOTE FROM NO ONE
• I'm sorry, what's Hugh Jones's role in all this again?
  

Page 123~

"You see, I had the cycle situated next to an old couch. As soon as the orgasm grabbed me, I'd fall off my bike onto the couch (1). Oh, incidentally—I'd have put a wild record on the phonograph that was kept down there, something with a big rock-'n'-roll beat. This not only further stimulated me, but it drowned out some of the wild laughing (2) that I enjoyed doing, during the moments that the climax had me in its vise" (3).

1. Oh, that old trick.
2. "Honey, what's going on in the basement? Is there supposed to be wild laughing in 'Daydream Believer'?"
3. Wow, her orgasm is a harsh mistress. Grabbing her ... putting her in a vise ... but she's laughing, so I guess it's cool.

~RP

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Paperback 401: Louisville Saturday / Margaret Long (Bantam 931)

Paperback 401: Bantam 931 (1st ptg, 1951)

Title: Louisville Saturday
Author: Margaret Long
Cover artist: Robert Skemp

Yours for: not for sale


Best things about this cover:

• "Louisville Saturday" being regional slang for a three-way. Not to be confused with a "Louisville Sunday," which is a decidedly sex- and alcohol-free evening of potroast and Lawrence Welk at your in-laws.
• This is the first vintage paperback I ever bought. I walked into a used bookstore in Ann Arbor after having read Robert Polito's "Savage Art" (a bio of Jim Thompson) looking for books that looked like the Amazing paperback originals reproduced in the book. It was somehow a revelation to realize that although I couldn't afford Thompson paperbacks, I could afford thousands and thousands of other books that had what I'd admired in the Thompson books—lurid cover art and sensational cover copy. Addiction set in almost immediately.
• Best thing about this cover—better than the young Robert Mitchum stopping dead in his tracks and double-taking on the we-might-be-hookers/friends/lesbians/sisters duo—is Mitchum's primly hatted lady companion, whose face is cut in half but who still has that unmistakable look of "well, I never" and "hussies!" written all over her (half) face.
• ... In An Army Town?!!! Nooooooo! Not that! (seriously, wtf? Replace "Army" with "Zombie," and maybe the drama would seem called for)
• "Frank!" I opened to a random page and was treated to an extended and oddly detailed description of breast-feeding. . . which is frank. Frankish, anyway.

Best things about this back cover:

• "Sort of," HA ha. High praise! "In that she uses words and writes about human beings, she is Totally Hemingwayesque!"
• Look at Sterling North, getting his early male feminist on!
• If this book was ever "burned" (for any reason other than keeping warm in an emergency), I'll eat my hat.

Page 123~

She was now repelled and hotly attracted by memories of swimming parties [1] and the embarrassing, rough nakedness of gross, coarse bodies suddenly exposed in swimming suits. She wondered that the familiar faces were still the same, with the alarming bodies so bare [2], that these men she knew were so shameless and unaware of their disgusting and appealing ugliness. [3]

1. "Memories of swimming parties"=not where I thought that sentence was going.
2. An allusion, of course, to the phrase that was originally *supposed* to rhyme with "rockets' red glare."
3. Wow ... she is, as they say in Louisville, messed up.

~RP

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Paperback 372: Male Virgin / Jack Woodford & John B. Thompson (Uni Books 67)

Paperback 372: Uni Books 67 (1st ptg, 1953)

Title: Male Virgin
Author: Jack Woodford & John B. Thompson
Cover artist: Bernard Safran

Yours for: $14


Best things about this cover:

• "Frank!"
• Who the hell is Norman Anthony and does he think Dr. Kinsey was a softcore novelist?
• I'd like this cover a hell of a lot better without that white strip across the bottom.
• Nothing but nothing about this cover says "Male Virgin." It doesn't say "Male." and it sure doesn't say "Virgin."
• Bernard Safran is an accomplished cover artist. Somehow surprised to see his work on a book from a publisher as marginal as this one.

Best things about this back cover:

• But... "socks" is already plural for "socks."
  
• Shouldn't the ellipsis be on the *other* side of "Until"?
• "With the accent on the sap"—that's actually pretty sweet.
• "MALE VIRGIN is laid in New Orleans..." — well, thanks for giving away the ending.

Page 123~

"In the conventional marriage, there is a lot of mumbo-jumbo ritual which does not in itself constitute a glue binding the principals together. Instead, it provides them both with ammunition which on innumerable occasions has been hurled back and forth in bitterness and recrimination."

This page is actually painfully sincere garbage about what marriage really ought to be about. It's practically the last page of the book. Also, this book has many passages which have been painstakingly underlined, as if someone was actually *studying* it for a test, or wisdom, or something equally improbable / unfathomable.

~RP

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Paperback 366: Bachelor Girl / Dorine B. Clark (Intimate Novels 54)

Paperback 366: Intimate Novels 54 (PBO, 1954)

Title: Bachelor Girl
Author: Dorine B. Clark
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $40


Best things about this cover:

• One of my favorite books. It has virtually everything I love: it's a rare imprint, in very good shape, it's about lesbians, it's "frank" ("brutally frank" acc. to back cover), it uses Kinsey as a tease (also back cover), it's got a major misspelling ("ecstacy?!") ... Home Run.
• Jeanne thinks wistfully of the time when she used to have a real telephone to talk on ...
• "Are these close mannish enough for you, honey? Honey? Are you dreaming about telephones again?!"
• Love the hint of a suggestion of a bed in the background. In case you can't put 2 and 2 together from the rest of the cover ... they're doing it.
• That's one aggressively foregrounded ashtray.
• Nice cleavage.

Best things about this back cover:

• The zigzag lines tell you these people are all mixed up, sexually—other things that tell you this are "twisted," "twisted," "torn," "perplexing problems," "mixed up mentally and physically," "strange pastures" ("Mooooo!"), and, of course, last but not least, "brutally frank" (tee hee!).
• This was published two years after the Kinsey Report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1952). I used this book in my talk at Hofstra last week as an example of a. the ways gayness was pathologized in paperbacks, and b. the way that Kinsey was used to legitimize public interest in gay-themed fiction. "It's science!"

"Ouch, that frankness hurt. Stop brutalizing me with your frankness!"
Page 123~

She had been blind for so long. But now she knew. Now she looked into her heart and felt utterly sure of her love for Jimmy. She listened to the hammering of her heart; she had hoped it would beat again to the rhythm of love.

I really, really wish I could tell you "Jimmy" was a woman. Sadly, this book ends as most lesbian fiction ended in the '50s (and earlier)—with the woman realizing ultimate happiness as a straight woman (that, or with the woman dying).

Sorry for the gap in publication. I should be back on schedule for the foreseeable future now.

[Me, speaking at Hofstra, 10/22/10]

~RP

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Paperback 323: The Hate Merchant / Niven Busch (Bantam A1204)

Paperback 323: Bantam A1204 (1st ptg, 1954)

Title: The Hate Merchant
Author: Niven Busch
Cover artist: Harry Schaare

Yours for: $11


Best things about this cover:

• "Hate for sale! Get your fresh hot hate here!"
• I like the drunk guy inciting the mob while doing an impression of Gene Kelly in 'Singin' in the Rain' — "What a glorious feeling, I'm h- ... Hey, look everybody. It's the giant floating head of Broderick Crawford! Get him!"
• That is the cock-teasiest cover picture I've seen in a long time. Look at her giving him the coy look and hiking up her skirt: "What? Oh, you want some of this ... this creamy, smooth thigh? Do you? Fat chance you stupid schlub! Call me when you get a real job!" "Why I oughta..." "Oh, your impotent rage is comical." Etc.
• Design fail: wraparound cover that doesn't. Why in the world do you put the blue frame down the left side when the painting actually *continues* around to the spine and back cover. It's called a 'wrap-around' for a reason, and you have totally blown the effect, jackasses.

Best things about this back cover:

• "Frank!"
• Thank god for the parenthetical "Ala." in the review; otherwise, how would we know which prestigious "Advertiser" was responsible for this blurbing gem?
• The mob action is much better on the back cover. More dynamic stick-wielders, more clearly suffering bodies.

Page 123~

Pros nodded. He reached for the bottle, but Splane moved it out of the way.

This is what happens when you let your 4-yr-old daughter name the characters in your book.

~RP

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Paperback 309: Yesterday's Love / James T. Farrell (Avon 260)

Paperback 309: Avon 260 (2nd ptg / 1st thus, 1950)

Title: Yesterday's Love
Author: James T. Farrell
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $17


Best things about this cover:

• You know what they say: "Yesterday's Love, Today's Floating Head"
• Marion celebrates her victory in the "Ornamented Boobs" contest by ordering up a pizza for her and the floating head of her recently deceased boyfriend: "Oh, and get extra anchovies. I can't taste for shit since I became incorporeal."
• "Yes, hello, Home Depot? My wallpaper seems to have grown a head. Also, it's astonishingly ugly. Can you help?"
• "Studs Lonigan" always struck me as a great porn name. "Long Studsigan" might be better, though perhaps too spot-on.

Best things about this back cover:

• Yes, I knew it. "Frankness!" I was just perusing this back cover going "come on, some form of the word 'frank.'" — "These stories will sear you with their frankness!" Then they will put you in the oven of "brutal awareness" and gently roast you until you are cooked through.
• Is James T. Farrell the reason so many writers and hipster affect a scroungey "I could give a fuck" look. This guy's got it down pat. He's like the original. "Hair-combing's for squares! Fuck ties! Where are my cigarettes?"

Page 123~

She went to Sonny. Harry looked at her with utter contempt. His eyes were full of hatred. He got up and turned on the radio. He could hear the child babbling and gaily talking to its mother as she washed him. He turned off the radio and sat there waiting until they would take their walk. Then they would eat their supper, see another moving picture, and come back to the hotel. [final paragraph of "The Sport of Kings"]

~RP

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2 books handed to me at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament: Book 2

Title: Consultation Room (Pocket 654, 1st ptg, 1949)
Author: Frederic Loom, M.D.
Cover artist: Stanley Meltzoff

Yours for: not for sale

• "What's the matter, doctor? Do my boobs ... frighten you?" "Er, I'll just put the stethoscope ... uh ... here, or ..." "Be a man!"
• "Normally, patients sit down for this exam. Also, normally they don't wear wedding dresses to the exam."
• This book should be called "What the Gigantic Brass Door Handle Knows"
• "My world has revolved around sex as a pivot" — "... as a pivot"?? That's redundant *and* stupid.
• "Frank!" I love when paperbacks get "frank." That means people are gonna do it in some non-marital and possibly non-missionary way.

• Clifton Fadiman shows off his mad (mad mad mad) blurbing skills, while the Dayton News tries, and fails, to make up an adjective.
• "From the young wife to the woman of 50" — All the way to 50!? Way to push the envelope, guys.
• "Frank!"

Page 123~

"Don't do it!" she cried when she could speak coherently. "Please let me have my baby now. I don't want to have a Brazilian soldier!"

"Brazilian soldier" being, of course, code for some fairly serious pre-delivery waxing.

~RP

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Paperback 147: Shock Treatment / Wright Williams (Beacon Books 143)

Paperback 147: Beacon Books 143 (PBO, 1957)
Title: Shock Treatment
Author: Wright Williams
Cover artist: Peeping Tom

Yours for: $7


Best things about this cover:

• I love how she looks - not terrified, but exasperated: "You again!?"
• Wait - I thought she was in her bathroom and the peeping tom was opening the window shade, but it seems just as likely she's in a hospital with mobile curtain dividers, in which case a. whose arm is that?, b. what's it yanking on?, and c. what is that red cloth? What am I looking at!?
• "AT LAST..." - HA ha. I was just asking myself, "Why is there no book that explores the borderland between love and perversity?" Now, at last, that void is filled.

Best things about this back cover:

• "Sure, big Eric was crazy. Crazy about women! And who can blame him? Am I right, guys!? Yeah, you know what I'm talking about ... [amused chuckles from drunk comedy club crowd] ... ah, chicks."
  
• Whimsical drawings of cruel medical experimentation. "It'll cure your pervertedness, but ... you're gonna experience some rubber-arm, I'm not gonna lie."
• Maybe those arms are supposed to represent the gyrations of patients at the "hospital dance" (!?)
• "Not since Snake Pit ..." - I can't stop laughing long enough to comment on that line
• "Frankly!"
• "Passion-wracked!"

Page 123~

Instead of thinking of Katrine as a lovely, attractive girl who had bravely come out of a harrowing experience, I was drawing mental pictures of her in bed with a man married to someone else. It was rotten of me, and I almost welcomed the self-loathing that I began to feel.

Well, we've all been there, right?

~RP

Paperback 142: Liana / Martha Gellhorn (Popular Library 529)

Paperback 142: Popular Library 529 (1st ptg, 1953)

Title: Liana
Author: Martha Gellhorn
Cover aritst: That guy who did all the Popular Library covers (i.e. I don't know)

Yours for: NOT FOR SALE


Best things about this cover:

• Note the censored (excised with scissors!) tagline - it should read: "Her Color Was No Barrier - To Men." I guess we're supposed to believe that that thing in red trunks is a man and not an oddly anthropomorphic lizard.
• "Are you done with your one-armed water chin-ups yet? My neck is getting tired."
• Martha Gellhorn was married to Ernest Hemingway. She was a writer and journalist of some note. I have no idea how she came to be responsible for whatever this book is.

Best things about this back cover:

• OK, this is officially the gayest not-explicitly-gay paperback I have blogged about to date. It wants you to think it's all about her, but the pictures say otherwise. It's beefcake central up in here. All the boy/girl interaction here feels forced and sexless.
  
• "Hey, Johnny Handsome, your broad, muscular back and impossibly toned ass are blocking my view of the lady!"
• "Now I'm going to show you what women's breasts look like, Johnny." Johnny backs away in discomfort ... while still managing to give us yet another view of his rippling delts and obliques.
• Her dress appears to zip down the front (!?) past her crotch (!!?)
  
• "... a realistic analysis of a woman's degradation" - Nothing sells books like a realistic analysis of degradation, boy howdy. It should have its own section of the bookstore.
  
• "Frankness!" - that means there's sex. Yee haw!

Page 123~

Liana sent the servants home early that night and they were glad to go. They would feel safer in their own flimsy homes with their own people.

Silly natives and their love of straw huts!

~RP

Paperback 52: Popular Library G517

Paperback 52: Popular Library G517 (1st ptg, 1961)

Title: A Race of Rebels
Author: Andrew Tully
Cover artist: Mitchell Hooks

Yours For: $8 (SOLD - 4/18/08)


Best things about this cover:

• She has the most orgasmic mouth in (non-porn) paperback history; that, or she is singing.
• Some blurbs are prescient - others ... not so much. "Good as Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms" must surely have been the last think Robert Ruark ever said as a literary critic, or generally credible human being.
• "A Race of Rebels" - Which race? "You know ... brown folks ... live where it's hot ... always getting riled up and killing people ... that race!"
• I like how the rebels are basically ornamentation for our giant, white-hot white couple.
  

Orgasm Mouth: "Honey, we're surrounded by a race of rebels. I'm scared."
Burt Lancaster: "It's OK, we're like giant white gods to them - shut up and kiss me!"

I'm telling you, Nothing on the front or back cover tells you much of anything about where these so-called "rebels" are rebelling. Palm trees suggest the tropics. Maybe Central America. It's like the publishers don't want you to know? I mean ... check out the ambiguity on the back cover copy. It's like Location: Exotic!

• Again, I have to ask: Where Are We?* It's like the publishers know Americans hate politics and can't find countries on maps anyway. Apparently, all the reader wants to know is: will it be "frank"? (where "frank" = "loin-stirring")
• "Frank, blunt, toughly tender" = that's what she said

RP

*Answer: Cuba

Paperback 51: Royal Giant 27

Paperback 51: Royal Giant 27 (PBO / PBO)

Title: Confessions of a Psychiatrist / The Woman He Wanted
Author: Henry Lewis Nixon / Daoma Winston [!!??]
Cover artist: Uncredited / Uncredited [but apparently signed "Uppwal..."]


Best things about this cover (where to begin!):

Confessions of a Psychiatrist:

• I love how the halo of light makes her look angelic, while the positioning of her hands ... let's just say that the less disturbing act she seems to be pantomiming involves strangling children.
• "You are getting sleepy ... hey, it's working!"
• Are they in a boudoir, or his office? Or does it matter anymore?
• What kind of bed is that? It's very low, and appears to consist only of a frame and a giant pillow.

The Woman He Wanted:

• Boobs! Blood! Yikes!
• LOVE the woman on the couch: "Best seat in the house! I'll just lie back here, cross my legs awkwardly, kick over my glass of whiskey, smoke a cigarette, and watch the brutality."
• "Daoma Winston" - I wanted to say that that is the ugliest, worst pseudonym ever, and yet ... "She" appears to have gone on to a long and successful career writing gothic / horror / fantasy stuff. Who knew? Notice how this bibliography of "her" work does not quite stretch back to The Woman He Wanted.

Best things about this back cover:

Copy writing at its histrionic, purply best:

Confessions:

• "Strange rite of nudity" - Nudity has its own rites now??? I am so behind the times.
• "Titillating treatise" = racy alliteration
• "Unblushing frankness" = code for sex sex sex - actually (a side note) "frank(ness)" is common in cover copy for books about all kinds of, let's say, "non-normative" sex-related behavior and conditions (e.g. gayness, transvestism, trans-sexuality, etc.). As I've said before, Kinsey gave this weird license to the publishing world to let loose with "educational" sex fiction.

Woman:

• He works at a "filling station" ... and he's "a crude man" ... HA ha
• STELL!! STELL!! (shout heard in sex-reversed version of "A Streetcar Named Desire")
• In case you missed it, his name is .... Stell. WTF?
• "... taunting him to splurge his passion on one of his other women" = too "frank" for my taste

RP