Paperback 1009: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea / Theodore Sturgeon (Pyramid G622)

Paperback 1009: Pyramid G622 (PBO, 1961)

Title: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Author: Theodore Sturgeon
Cover artist: Jim Mitchell (credited, back cover)

Condition: 8/10
Estimated value: $10-15

Best things about this cover:

• I guess if your name's Sturgeon, writing about sea creatures is probably inevitable
• Love the design on the dragon-eel, and the sub, and the font. Peak midcentury fantasy design
• This was a movie, apparently. It was also a television show, which is streaming via Amazon Prime, which I discovered because who wouldn't be curious after seeing this book
• The writing in this book is superior. Sparkling and witty in a way I do not associate with novelizations of B movies. But that's what happens, I guess, when you get a legend to do the work, I guess. Sturgeon is something else

Best things about this back cover:

• AFIRE is a word I don't see that often, except in crosswords
• I really, really want Destiny to be the name of some aquatic femme fatale
• Here's the movie, free on youtube. The format is completely jacked, so I don't think I can bear watching it. Maybe if I ever get super-bored. I'm almost certain this book is infinitely superior to the movie

Page 123~

It was Emery, too, who wondered what had killed the whale. Even the ripped, tattered evidence of the 'cudas at work could not conceal that the whale had been riven, blasted, crushed. Someone aboard might certainly have thought of an answer if it had not been for the murder of O'Brien.

Normal reader: "Whoa, what a vivid image of a mangled whale being feasted on by barracudas." Me: "Hmmm .... CUDAS ... I wonder if I should add that to my crossword wordlist ..."

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]

Paperback 345: Devil Ray, Devil Woman / Seymour Shubin (Beacon 167)

Paperback 345: Beacon 167 (PBO, 1960—Australia ed.)

Title: Devil Ray, Devil Woman
Author: Seymour Shubin
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: not for sale (gift of Doug Peterson)


Best things about this cover:

• "Do you like my hair up, or ..." "Yeah yeah, sure, now are you gonna get naked or not?"
• OK, which is it? A Flaming Story or a Sophisticated, Dramatic Tale. I got no time for this wishy-washy in-between crap.
• "To Most" is my very favorite part of the cover copy. I mean, "in search of forbidden excitement" makes so much more sense, but any reasonably qualified copy writer could come up with that. It takes a true master of whatthefuckery to rephrase it so that we're left wondering not just what the excitement is, but for whom it is not "forbidden" but entirely licit.
• She has a nice figure. I'm just sayin'...
• I hope she's standing well away from the bed, bec. otherwise she is a giant or that smoking (!) hot guy is criminally diminutive.
• That's one slab of a bed.
• Worst title! "The woman, she is a like a Devil Ray, in that she is devilish, and ... Devil Ray has the word "devil" in it, so ..." Imagination!

Best things about this back cover:

• Ugh. It's a text bloodbath back here.
• So this is an ordinary soft-core sex novel, with stock footage from a Jacques Cousteau special? I can't wait.

Page 123~

"Sure no one a beer?" and now Tony was in the doorway.

I swear to you that I have typed that exactly as written, character for character.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

PS I *thought* I'd seen this cover somewhere before. Well, I hadn't, but here's something close: Paperback 63, Variation on a Theme:

Paperback 169: The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (Red Seal 17)

Paperback 169: Red Seal 17 (1st ptg, 1937)

Title: The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze
Author: William Saroyan
Cover artist: N/A

Yours for: $22


Best things about this cover:

• The red seal makes a nice pattern, but ... that's really all there is to say about this cover, aesthetics-wise.
• Modern Age Books - which includes Red Seal, as well as Blue and Gold Seal books - are remarkable only for their historical importance. This book is from the pre-mass market era (i.e. before Pocket Books started up in 1939). So novel was the idea of issuing books in paper covers (in much bigger printing runs and at much lower prices) that the publisher has printed an entire page at the back of the book explaining the rationale for the whole enterprise. I reprint that page here, in lieu of the back cover, which is just more seals (as always, just click to enlarge):
  

Page 123~

For there is some grace in dying quietly amid some fragment of a fragment of another's death and there is some grace in standing in the mazdalight our noblest contribution to sleeplessness our offering to children dying standing in the mazdalight awake and awake and dying and alive and the grace is a form of immobility as of quiet death and it is of the dance and the dance is of stone hard rock and never of fluid never of waves in motion and the dance is of smash of mountain graceful sky beloved pointlessness.

And you thought Joyce was inscrutable. "Beloved pointlessness" would be a nice title for something. My life story, perhaps. Saroyan is my homeboy, after all.

~RP