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

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and BlueSky]

Paperback 742: The Quick Brown Fox / Lawrence Schoonover (Bantam 1178)

Paperback 742: Bantam 1178 (1st ptg, 1953)

Title: The Quick Brown Fox
Author: Lawrence Schoonover
Cover artist: Harry Schaare

Yours for: $16


Best things about this cover:

• "Hey, baby, I'm just a quick brown fox looking for a lazy dog … wait, let me rephrase that … oh, man, I shouldn't have drunk All That Alcohol."
• I count five bottles. I assume other people were there, earlier.
• I love this cover so much. So many details. Wreaths! Charts! Rolodexes! Typewriters! 
• I also love her I-could-take-you-or-leave-you expression. Seriously sexy.

Best things about this back cover:

• Gah. Horrible.
• You'll pardon me if I don't think "dry Gibsons, quick seductions and eccentric clients" sound "dreary."
• There is a hole-punch in the shape of an apostrophe at the bottom left of this back cover. I have no idea why.

Page 123~

But lately, Betty said, while Don was drinking so much and getting all these weird and twisted notions about her, the banks had been uncooperative with some of his loans and the finance company had been pressing them about payments on the car. 

Let me get this straight: it's a book about mid-century Madison Avenue and two of the main characters are a couple named "Don" and "Betty"? And "Don was drinking…" Huh. Interesting. Sounds familiar.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]

Paperback 415: Galaxy (January, 1956)

Paperback 415: Galaxy, January 1956

Authors include: Alan E. Nourse, James E. Gunn, Lester del Rey, Robert Abernathy, Robert Sheckley, and Richard R. Smith

Cover artist: Ed Emshwiller

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• A cover painting of astonishing detail, complexity, and charm. Hang out with it for a few minutes—it's really something.
• The sweat on Santa's brow does not look like sweat. The only comments I have border on the sacrilegious, so I'm gonna move on.
• Is he doing calculus?
• LOVE the way "EMSH" embeds his signature in his paintings (today, he's the author of the awesomely titled "How to Manage Reindeer in Space")
• I want that coffee pot So Bad...
• I know the dude has four arms, but he'd still never need more than two to hold a coffee cup, ergo that coffee cup is ridiculous.

Best things about this back cover:

• I just like that the "Science-hyphen-Fiction Book Club" has a "Dept. GX-1" — that's got government front / conspiracy theory written all over it.

Page 123~ (from "The Ties of Earth" by James H. Schmitz)

It sounded like an esoteric classification of varying degrees of human psi potential — an ascendant individual "new mind" threatening the entrenched and experienced but more limited older group, which compensated for its limitation by bringing functioning members of the "new mind" under its control or repressing or diverting their developing abilities.

That's what I like to call "teaching."


[More by EMSH...]
~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]

Paperback 160: Galaxy Science Fiction (December 1959)

Paperback 160: Galaxy Science Fiction (December 1959)

• Includes work by: Robert Bloch ("Sabbatical"), Philip K. Dick ("War Game"), Frederick Pohl ("The Snowmen"), Robert Sheckley, Willy Ley, George O. Smith, A.J. Offutt, and others
• Cover artist: EMSH (best cover artist name ever) - real name = Ed Emshwiller

Yours for: $14


Best things about this cover:

• It is aDORable. I want to make Christmas cards out of this cover.
• Martian pyjamas
• Santa has four arms
• I want that rocket that Santa is holding
• Really, the design on this cover is astonishingly beautiful. It's like Norman Rockwell meets mid-century modern meets The Future. The little silver snowflake-stars around the date / price just seal the deal
• How did Robert Bloch and Philip K. Dick get driven off the front cover by ... these guys. A.J. Offutt? He should be banished for name ugliness alone.
  

Best things about this back cover

• Seriously, one of the Worst ads I've ever seen. Shouldn't the NAME OF YOUR PRODUCT be featured ... somewhere? Prominently? I mean, if the title had been "What's In IF For You?" I might have been impressed. Maybe that was the idea and the typesetter just effed up.
• "We often wonder why all our readers aren't subscribers" = "We often wonder why we can't pay our bills each month"
• I imagine the most boring, droning, Hugh Beaumont-esque guy making this would-be sales pitch. "When you subscribe to our magazine, it comes straight to your house via a little bit of magic we like to call: The Mail"
• Who designed this, Luddites!? It's like the anti-ad!

Page 123~

"People are always watching me, Brother," I said. "So now they do it even when they aren't around. I should have known it would come to that."

-from "Charity Case" by Jim Harmon

This is far too prescient for me to snark on.

~RP

Paperback 37: Doubleday (unnumbered)

Paperback 37: Doubleday (unnumbered) (PBO promo, 1984)

Title: And All Through the House
Author: Ed McBain
Cover artist: Uncredited

"Hello, and welcome to the 87th Precinct. May I help you? ... Yes, I am aware that I am a sheep. What is your point? Baa."

This story was originally published in "Playboy," as far as I can tell. Why individual copies were made and circulated, I don't know. This little paperback version of the story was certainly never for sale - though a far more elaborate, hardback, slipcase edition did sell in bookstores (I own a copy of that too, because I am a book nerd). Did I mention that this book is signed by the author? Well, it is, which is surely the only reason I bought it in the first place (for $9.50 - I've got it priced at $40).


Ed McBain is the most famous pen name of Evan Hunter, a major crime fiction writer whose career began in the height of the paperback revolution (1950's). He wrote under his own name and also many pseudonyms, including most notably Ed McBain and William Marsten. He died in 2005. I have many Ed McBain / Evan Hunter / William Marsten novels in my collection. Stay tuned.

RP