Paperback 477: Uncle Tom's Children / Richard Wright (Penguin 647)

Paperback 477: Penguin 647 (1st ptg, 1947)

Title: Uncle Tom's Children
Author: Richard Wright
Cover artist: jonas

Yours for: $20

Best things about this cover:

• Kind of an abrupt shift from all the sexed-up lesbian stuff I've been trafficking in lately.
• Simple, gruesome, effective cover from "jonas," one of the most important early pb cover artists.
• Really digging the title font. Also, that dude's pocket square.

Best things about this back cover:

• Back cover from back when paperbacks still modeled their back covers after those on the insides of hardcover dust jackets. Very straitlaced and informative and decidedly non-sensational.
• The first recipient of the Spingarn medal was Ernest Everett Just (1915). Trivia!

Page 123~

There was silence. Then Hadley laughed, noiselessly.

Laughed noiselessly? You might want to check that he's not choking.

~RP

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Paperback 361: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter / Carson McCullers (Penguin 596)

Paperback 361: Penguin 596 (1st ptg, 1946)

Title: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Author: Carson McCullers
Cover artist: jonas

Yours for: $12


Best things about this cover:

• This looks like scraps from the picture file for a Monty Python animation sketch
• A rebus! I love these. OK, I'm going to say ... "Your heart cannot soar if your hands are chained ... and a kid sells fruit." Powerful stuff.
• Good example of the more abstract cover style of the '40s (jonas is legendary, and prolific)

Best things about this back cover:

• It's just a bio, so ... not much to say.
• Interesting how much focus is on her apparently surprising ability to treat "Negro" characters as if they were (news flash!) human beings. I guess that's all just in the Wright quote, but it stands out.
• This is my third "Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" cover. See also here and here.

Page 123~

Portia took up the Bible from the table in the center of the room. "What part you want to hear now, Grandpapa?"

"It all the book of the Holy Lord. Just any place your eye fall on will do."

~RP

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Paperbacks 284-287: The work of Clark Hulings

Sorry for missing Wednesday. First week of school had me a bit overwhelmed and I completely spaced. To make up for it — a glut of paperbacks. Four, to be precise, all featuring the cover art of Clark Hulings. I culled all the Hulings covers I had and scanned them at the request of someone producing an article on Hulings for Illustration magazine. Sadly, upon perusing the covers I have, there's no signature style that I can see, and no one cover that really makes you go 'wow.' They are all very typical mid '50s covers, but only "Savage Holiday" really gives Hulings a broad enough canvas to have a real artistic impact. The others crowd the cover with text and offer only tiny pictures — mostly free-floating heads. Cover for "Winesburg, Ohio" is about as dull and generic as they come. The clear WINner here is "The Brave, Bad Girls." Bold, bright design with fantastic background use of the familiar fedora'd and trenchcoated detective. Coincidentally (I assume), two of these covers deal with interracial themes.

Paperback 284: Lion Library 47 (PBO, 1954)

Title: Strange Barriers
Author: J. Vernon Shea (ed.)

Yours for: $12


Best things about this cover:

• "Strange Fruit" + "Racial Barriers" = "Strange Barriers"
• Given the tagline, this cover is *very* disappointing. Where's the tumult, I ask!?
• These heads are drawn in different styles, to different scales, with different textures ... we get it, they're different! There's a "barrier." etc.
• Mark Schorer?

Best things about this back cover:

• "I'm enthralled by his jazz trumpeting, but his shirtless gun-toting just makes me howl with laughter."
• Man, I really, really wish I knew what was going on in that last panel.

Paperback 285: Avon T-86 (PBO!!!?, 1954)

Title: Savage Holiday
Author: Richard Wright

Yours for: $25


Best things about this cover:

• Oh no, why is bed-headed Anthony Perkins attacking Lena Horne!?
• "I was just borrowing your Dick Tracy trenchcoat! I swear I was gonna put it back!"
• Love the random pseudo-japonesque pattern on those curtains.
• "I've made my decision, Steve. I choose the roses — not you."
• Her hands look very wrong — like she's got extra fingers or stubby fingers or fused fingers or something.

Best things about this back cover:

• The first and last time "The Yale Review" was used as a blurb on a paperback book.

Paperback 286: Signet 1304 (2nd ptg, 1956)

Title: Winesburg, Ohio
Author: Sherwood Anderson

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• "Breathe, damn you, breathe! Oh, why won't that doctor stop staring wistfully into the distance and get over here and help me!"

Best things about this back cover:

• Why is there no picture of "The girl who walked naked in the rain"!? Booooo!
• Thank god my neighbors "completely hide their private lives from" me. Barely repressed anger + miniature fainting couches (!?) = some crazy-ass !@#@ I don't need to know about.

Paperback 287: Perma Books M-3089 (1st ptg, 1957)

Title: The Brave, Bad Girls
Author: Thomas B. Dewey

Yours for: $9


Best things about this cover:

• Damned sticker pull!
• Red-on-yellow Totally makes this cover pop. Beautiful.
• Looove the expression on Girl 1 — nice, smug F@#$ You expression to complement the (in order) Just Woke Up, Meek and Scared, and Suicidally Depressed expressions of the others.

Best things about this back cover:

• "A Man! A Man, I say!"
• "A large pea?" — wtf? Like ... a marble? A dime? How big is a "large pea?" Are we talking freakishly, County-Fair-ribbon-winning large or what?
• Things Not To Say To A Lady You Just Met: "Just for tonight ... I wish you were seventeen."

Page 123~

• I was a friend of Karl Kadek's ("The Brave, Bold Girls")
• He took a cheap revolver from the case and began to wave it about. "You get out of here!" he shrieked. "We don't want any collar fasteners here!" ("Winesburg, Ohio")
• "On a Sunday morning?" There was a trace of scorn in his voice. "And what would he be doing barefooted?" ("Savage Holiday")
• Then he saw the hole in Jenny's side, right between the ribs. It was round, wet, red. ("Almos a Man" by Richard Wright —from "Strange Barriers")

Jenny is a mule, for the record.

~RP

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Paperback 165: Omnibook, August 1945 (incl. excerpt of "Black Boy" by Richard Wright)

Paperback 165: Omnibook, August 1945

• Includes: "Authorized abridgments of four best-selling books," including "Black Boy" by Richard Wright - plus a "Back of the Book" essay by Bennett Cerf
• Cover artist: Stefan Salter

Yours for: $12


Best things about this cover:

• He's cyanotic! Clear! Stat! Seven cc's of ... something (my 1990s "e.r." lingo has run out)
• This painting is eerie and gorgeous. That kid is scaring the hell out of me, though. He does not look happy. He looks like he wants his lunch money back.
• I don't know if Salter intended for the kid's collar (the open neck part) to sort of kind of look like an outline of Africa, but either way - awesome.
• I have a student who looks just like this kid. Well, he's just dark black, not blue, but that combination of menace and wonder in the eyes - the likeness is startling. Sadly, said student is currently in maximum security prison.

Best things about this back cover:

• Hey, Bennett Cerf - I may know him from such game shows as "What's My Line?"
• This article is actually really engaging - too bad it's "to be continued" inside the magazine (where you can't see it).
• The cartoons in the corners are fabulous.
• This article is reminding me that I have Terry Teachout's bio of Mencken still waiting for me, unread, on the bookshelf downstairs. I basically live my life surrounded by books that are staring at me, disgusted at my never having read them.

Page 123~

from "Coming Home," By Lester Cohen:

There was something about Stell, he thought, if she kissed you, if it was the real thing to her, the rest just came with it.

"The rest?" What? Her lungs? Her lunch?

~RP