Paperback 513: Flying High / Eve Linkletter (Nite-Time Books 3001)

Paperback 513: Nite-Time Books (???) 3001 (PBO, 1964)

Title: Flying High  
Author: Eve Linkletter
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: Not for Sale (gift to the collection from Doug Peterson)

Best things about this cover:

• About the unsexiest naked lady I've ever seen on one of these covers. It's like she rolled around in charcoal. The GIGANTIC smirking floating head isn't making things any sexier.
• She's got a vaguely Bettie Page look, but nothing of Page's charm or allure. First you're gonna have to clean her off. Then give her context. then maybe a slightly less art-school-modely position. Then take a bat to that bloated piñata hovering over her left shoulder.
• That dude's hat is jiffy popping past captain's hat toward chef's toque.
• This is the lowest-rent paperback publisher I've ever seen. I actually don't know what the publisher's name is. GSN??? NT (Nite-Time)??? The publication page says "Fitz Publications." I think it's homemade / Canadian.

Best things about this back cover:

• Yeah, that's how you usually spell "Bob."
• "... a doll who turned out to be one of the boys..." OK, now I'm intrigued.
• Semicolon? Really? Come on. That just hurts.
• Eve Linkletter wrote some queer (in both senses of the word) stuff for Fabian or Saber or one of those cheap Fresno outfits run by Sanford Aday in the late '50s / early '60s. I've never seen her name elsewhere. 

Page 123~

The bar was almost deserted except for about nine people.

So ... not deserted at all. Gotcha.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]

Paperback 70: Our Flesh Was Cheap / Eve Linkletter (Fabian Z-128)

Paperback 70: Fabian Z-128 (PBO, 1959)

Title: Our Flesh Was Cheap
Author: Eve Linkletter
Cover artist: Uncredited


Best things about this cover:

• "Are you depressed? Is your apartment a dank, run-down hovel? Is your flesh, well, cheap? Then why not join the movement that's sweeping the nation - Knit Your Way to Happiness!"
• This cover is decidedly unsexy. Coverless bed, cracked walls, naked lightbulb, portrait of Dear Old Grandma (or Man With Enormous Beard). And yet some kind of Cézanne-esque still life appears to have broken out on the book's western border...
• "Our Flesh was Cheap" - starring Illeana Douglas!

Best things about this back cover:

It's the same as the last back cover - clearly the country was in the grip of Eve-mania.

RP

Paperback 69: The Gay Ones / Eve Linkletter (Fabian Z-124)

Paperback 69: Fabian Z-124 (PBO, 1958)

Title: The Gay Ones
Author: Eve Linkletter
Cover artist: "Chuck"

Yours for: SOLD! (4-28-08)


Best things about this cover:

• Absolutely nothing about this cover screams "Gay" except the text. Am I supposed to believe that dancer is a man? No way. Am I supposed to believe that female spectator is turned on? Come on. What I see is Captain Smoky Bowtie ogling the gam of a rather voluptuous female dancer. "Where is the gay?," I ask. Is the hazy shade of purple supposed to suggest gayness? I have a right to know.
• "The third sex" was a not-uncommon way to refer to homosexual folk in the mid 20th century. "Pranks of nature," however, is a new phrase to me.
• I can only hope that Eve Linkletter has some relation to Art "Kids Say the Darnedest Things" Linkletter.

Best things about this back cover:

• I've just ... never seen anything like this. So ahead of its time - using the back cover not to provide information about the book, but to market the image of the author. Nice faux signature at the bottom, too. "Eve ... just Eve."

RP

PS Check out G's site - its banner is basically a collage of images from this site. It's so beautiful that I want to steal it (and / or hire her to make me one like it).