Paperback 1030: Damon Runyon Favorites / Damon Runyon (Pocket Books 158)

Paperback 1030: Pocket Books 158 (1st ptg, 1942)

Title: Damon Runyon Favorites
Author: Damon Runyon
Cover artist: criminally uncredited [Frank J. Lieberman]

Condition: 8.5/10
Estimated value: $20

Best things about this cover:

• You guys it's just so beautiful. I don't really have much to say. It just evokes a whole era, a magical place and time, as seen through the haze of nostalgia. It's So Soft.
• The orange is wonderfully bright. These early Pocket Books are rarely this nice, with the colors unfaded and the Permagloss largely intact (just the tiniest bits of pull-away on some of the edges). Not perfectly square, but perfectly tight. Pages are practically bone white. Not sure it's been read at all.
• That cab!
• I want to go to Mindy's *right now*.

Best things about this back cover:

• Master Of The Main Stem! (!) (!?) (!!??)
• I wonder when "according to Walter Winchell" stopped working.
• Runyon is such an important popularizer of the colloquial speech and lowbrow slang that dominated mid-century crime fiction. Colorful New York characters. Big False Face! BFF!

Page 123~ (from "Sense of Humor")

"Why," he says, "do not you hear the news about Rosa? She takes the wind on me a couple of months ago for my friend Frankie Ferocious, and is living in an apartment over in Brooklyn, right near his house, although," Joe says, "of course you understand I am telling you this only to answer your question, and not to holler copper on Rosa."

Joe the Joker doesn't want to holler copper because Rosa spends money like nobody's business and Frankie is about to find out how expensive she is. Dames!

~RP

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Paperback 478: College Confidential / Irving Shulman (Gold Medal s1005)

Paperback 478: Gold Medal s1005 (PBO, 1960)

Title: College Confidential
Author: Irving Shulman
Cover artist: [movie still]

Yours for: $15

Best things about this cover:

• If this is what prayer meetings are really like, sign me the hell up.
• "This big, I swear!" "Ha ha ha ha, good one, Mamie"
• If there's anyone I'd trust to bring me the hot details of a college sex scandal, it's some guy named "Irving."

Best things about this back cover:

• And by "STUDY," we mean "MASTURBATE TO"
• One requirement of 1950s headshots was that the actor be leaning heavily to one side, looking either bored (exhibit A) or hopped up (exhibit B). 
• Steve Allen has this look like "I know, I can't believe I'm in this film either."

Page 123~

"The way we got it," Bob scowled, because he had not expected this frank admission, "you had a lot of students up here for a drunken brawl and—" he hooked both thumbs into his heavy gun belt—"dirty movies."

At this point, the sexy porn music starts playing and the gun belt comes *off!" P.S. "Frank!"

~RP

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57 Books from the University Book Sale: Book 33 and 34

Title: Roosevelt and Hopkins (in two volumes!) (Bantam nn, October 1950)
Author: Robert E. Sherwood
Cover artist: photos

Yours for: $8 (for the two)

• "Oh, Hopkins, how I think of you when you're away ..."
  
• I bought these because a. I don't have much non-fiction / history / biography in my collection, and b. I had noooooooooo idea how a two-volume biography of a president of the U.S. could be (half-) dedicated to a Man I Had Never Heard Of. Hopkins!? Gerard Manley is the only Hopkins I know. Oh, and Johns.
• Harry Hopkins was an important adviser to FDR — one of the architects of the New Deal (acc. to Wikipedia).

Vol 2:

• What the hell has FDR got on his shoulder? His wife's hat?

• Major props to FDR for being the only one of the three world leaders in this photo who doesn't look like a total asshole.

Page 123~

After he became Secretary of State, Marshall told me that he believed that his appointment as Chief of Staff in 1939 had been primarily due to Harry Hopkins.

In return, Marshall had to give Hopkins his first-born child.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]