Paperback 1117: Night and the City / Gerald Kersh (Dell 374)

 Paperback 1117: Dell 374 (1st ptg, 1950)

Title: Night and the City

Author: Gerald Kersh

Cover artist: [movie still: Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney]

Condition: 6/10

Value: $10-15

Best things about this cover: 

• Two of the greatest, smoldering for your attention
• This is one of my favorite movies, and one of the greatest films noirs of all time. It's probably my favorite movie of 1950, which is Saying Something (1950, after all, has All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, Born Yesterday, etc.)
• Harry Fabian is the quintessential noir hero. Antihero. Loser-hero. Just wants to be somebody. Thinks he can work the system and outsmart the big boys. Finds out ... otherwise. If that's not noir, I don't know what is.

Best things about this back cover: 

• Mapback! All books should be mapbacks. I really don't understand why they're not.
• Frank! Feels like forever since the "Frank!" alarm has gone off. My favorite paperback cover adjective returns (albeit in adverbial form)
• Cabbie, please take me directly to HONKATONK BOTTLE-PARTY. Located at ... [squints at book] ... 5? No, just 5. I don't know. 5! Find it! Use "The Knowledge!"

Page 123~

    He walked slowly back to Rupert Street, entered quietly and undressed in silence. He was relieved to see that Zoë slept soundly.

    He undressed and crept into bed beside her.

    She sighed, and whispered: "Chihuahua—"

   

Look, I'm sure there is explanatory context here, I'm just saying, I don't wanna know it. I'm gonna just assume that "Chihuahua" is a term of endearment for Harry, or else that she is dreaming of tiny dogs ... or that "Chihuahua" was the name of her childhood sled.

~RP

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Paperbacks 1115 & 1116: The Ivory Grin & The Way Some People Die (Bantam 10979 & 10987)

Paperbacks 1115 & 1116: Bantam 10979 & 10987) (6th ptg, 1977 / 8th ptg, 1977)

Titles: The Ivory Grin & The Way Some People Die

Author: Ross Macdonald

Cover artist: Mitchell Hooks

Condition: 8/10 & 8/10

Value: $5-10 each

Best things about this cover: 

• I said last time that I had one more of these late'70s Archer covers by Mitchell Hooks, but it seems I lied: I had two, bringing my total to five. I guess I collect these now? Subcollection! Just what I need...
• Well yeah, sure, grins don't get much more ivory than that. 
• The dude loading the gun looks like a very disappointed middle manager. "We didn't make our quota this quarter, team. I told you there'd be consequences..."
• I'm super into that cat burglar guy but he's about a centimeter in height, and it's hard to truly love a design element that small. 
• The tealish hue coating every element of this painting is kinda sickly, but somehow when set against the equally sickly pale yellow background, it ends up ... perfect?

Best things about this 2nd cover: 

• Maybe my least favorite of these Archer covers so far. Still good, but the people look like they're carved out of wood. Looks a little sloppy, a little lifeless. But the neon signs and palm trees and dead guy are ... mwah!
• Her hair is insane. I can only hope that it's a wig. Her posture and expression are priceless, though: "Sigh, bikinis are so tiresome ... when do we drink?"
• Does the dead guy have a toupee that's come loose, or did he flatten a small bird with his head when he fell?

No point doing back covers, since they're just that same shadowy photo of Macdonald from the last book. So on to ...

Page 123~ (from The Way Some People Die)

    "The dirty bastard picked up and left me," she said in a deep harsh voice. Her eyes were round with anger, or surprise at her own language. "Good heavens," she said in her normal voice, "I never swear, honestly."

    "Swear some more. It will probably do you good."

~RP

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Paperback 1114: The Wycherly Woman / Ross Macdonald (Bantam 12120)

 Paperback 1114: Bantam 12120 (7th ptg, 1978)

Title: The Wycherly Woman

Author: Ross Macdonald

Cover artist: Mitchell Hooks

Condition: 9

Value: $10-15

Best things about this cover: 

• "Finally, I have invented a gun that doubles as an electric razor. What should I do? Hmm..."
• Now yearning for a blue dress shirt with a pink roadster and red-moon night scene on it.
• Who puts a purple rectangle there? It's such a weird bold amazing choice.
• They could've gone a more conventional "sexy dame" route, but instead they leaned into half-drunk, half-dressed, bored and barefoot. A completely riveting nonchalance. Love it.
• This is the third late-'70s Mitchell Hooks Lew Archer book in my collection (the fourth is coming up next). The whole run may be the greatest-looking series reprint I've ever seen. I want them all. I would hang any of them on my wall. Immaculate detective fiction vibes. I don't usually collect past 1970 very much because the pictorial cover art I love devolves like crazy starting around the mid-60s, but this late-70s revival goes full throwback mode, and since so much of classic detective fiction is suffused with nostalgia and world-weariness anyway ... it's perfect. I wish (to god) books looked like this today. Like, get all your promotional textual clutter out of my face and give me Art! (and this one is only middling compared to the rest of the set)

Best things about this back cover: 

• OK, there's minimal text (see front), and then there's this. 
• At first glance, I thought it was a painting of Lew Archer, but no, that's a photograph of Ross Macdonald himself. Doing a damn fine P.I. impression, if you ask me. 
• He looks like the guy on the cover's dad. Or his mentor. I'd hire this guy, is what I'm saying. Not sure I'd trust the front-cover. I'm not even sure he's sure. Look at him. He's like "what am I doing with my life? Am I up to this? Why isn't that woman wearing pants? Could my shave be closer?" I need someone a little more confident.

Page 123~

"Catherine Wycherly is running loose around the countryside with murder on her mind."

Hey, hey, whoa! spoiler alert!

~RP

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Paperback 1113: World So Wide / Sinclair Lewis (Pyramid G596)

 Paperback 1113: Pyramid G596 (1st ptg, 1961)

Title: World So Wide

Author: Sinclair Lewis

Cover artist: Tom Miller

Condition: 7/10

Value: $5-8

Best things about this cover: 

• They shoulda called this "Gondola So Wide." Gondola so wide it fills the frame and reduces the lovely languishing lady to the size of a postage stamp. More bored expatriates in party dresses, fewer expanses of dull blue-gray, please!
• The composition is actually very nice, it's just that I don't buy these books for their lovely motel-room-quality pictures of exotic locales. I buy them for the sexy people acting strangely. For the hair, for the shoes. For the fashion. For the depravity. For the world-weary ennui of the mid-century sophisticate. This tepid gondola scene gives me (almost) none of this.
• To his credit, the artist (Tom Miller! Credited!) does a good job of making the couple pop. That damn pink dress against the somehow even pinker cushion? Magnificent. Also magnificent: her half-interest in Jake Trustfund there. Jake: "I love you, darling!" Her: "Mmm, yes. I know. Let's practice being quiet."

Best things about this back cover: 

• This ... this just tints the least interesting part of the front cover pink!? Boo! Boo to this back cover designer, I say.
• Adjectives must come in pairs! "Blazing sunny!" "warm and human!" "hot, passionate!" "scathing, cynical!" Can't believe they left "amazing" in there unattended.
• Lewis had been accused of being "Red" after the publication of It Can't Happen Here, a novel from the mid-'30s that imagined what American fascism would look like. The book was ... prescient. It concerned "a demagogue [Windrip] who is elected President of the United States, after fomenting fear and promising drastic economic and social reforms while promoting a return to patriotism and "traditional" values. After his election, Windrip takes complete control of the government via self-coup and imposes totalitarian rule with the help of a ruthless paramilitary force" (wikipedia). Sound familiar? No? OK.

Page 123~

The five of them, plus the inescapable Marchesa Valdarno, sat prim about the refectory table of Irish oak, eating their molds of rice with duck livers served on English plates with views of Kent, while Belfont, with what he felt to be gentlemanly but learned humor, pumped Lundsgard, who answered with good-hearted simplicity.

This is very precise, poetic writing. And yet I can't help but wish there were more about "the inescapable Marchesa Valdarno." Flipping through the book, I find that the Marchesa "suavely jeered not only at America but at Parisian drunkards, English watering-places, old Roman society, and the Sadie Lurcher Riviera set [!!!?], of which Valdarno herself was a member." I'd sit next to her at the refectory table of Irish oak any day.

~RP

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Paperback 1112: The Off-Islanders / Nathaniel Benchley (Popular Library SP178)

 Paperback 1112: Popular Library SP178 (1st ptg, 1962)

Title: The Off-Islanders

Author: Nathaniel Benchley

Cover artist: Uncredited

Condition: 7/10

Value: $20 (the only copies I can find online are priced at $90, which is ridiculous)

Best things about this cover: 

• This looks zany in a very specifically '60s kind of way. It's a mad, mad, mad, mad submarine on a sandbar
• Alternate title: Big Day for Binos
• The shapely redhead with a run in her stockings really makes the cover. Bored with the boys and their boy games.

Best things about this back cover: 

• OK, that's the same picture from the front cover
• OK, that's the same blurb from the front. Someone's ... not trying
• "Capitalistic sandbar" is a bar I would drink at
• "Extra-marital shenanigans" OK fine you got me, I'll read you, you silly book

Page 123~

The first look at Polsky was always a shock, because he not only had no neck but also appeared to have no head; his features seemed to grow out of a slight lump midway between his shoulders. He seldom wore a cap, since the visor came so close to his collar as to all but cover his face, and on the occasions that required full-dress uniform he became dizzy from lack of fresh air.

~RP

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Paperback 1111: Every Girl is Entitled to a Husband / Nina Farewell (MacFadden Books 75-116)

 Paperback 1111: MacFadden 75-116 (1st, 1964)

Title: Every Girl is Entitled to a Husband

Author: Nina Farewell

Cover artist: Roy Doty 

Illustrated by: Roy Doty

Condition: 7    

Value: $15

[from a big box of books sent to me by reader "Gail"]

Best things about this cover: 

• "If you've got what it takes, but no one takes it" is, I have to admit, a good opening line.
• I also love that Buy is italicized. "Stop thumbing through the book and just buy it already! This is a drug store, lady, not a lending library!"
• You can read this cover as a complex metaphor about marriage being simultaneously exalting and stifling. Or you can read it as "Gladys's avant-garde entry in the Ladies Auxiliary cake-decorating contest."
• The cartooning here is perfect, in its perfectly iconic bland suburban white adult couple-ness. The lady actually looks great, and man that nose is perfectly vertical. Something to behold.

Best things about this back cover: 

• Love a good survey. Were women supposed to cut along that dotted line and send the survey ... somewhere? Seems like it would be easier to just tear the whole back cover off and send that in.
• Gonna need to see those other 14 other "Pleasures" first, please, thanks.
• "(the book)"—not sure why this bit from the Hartford Courant is making me laugh, but it is. "Sorry, perhaps the referent of 'it' is not totally clear; I am referring, of course, to the book as a whole, thank you for listening to this parenthetical comment."
• I love that whoever "designed" this back cover has the confidence and courage to just go by one name. Copy editor: "OK, so ... Karol what?" Karol: "Just ... Karol! You know, like 'Gowns by Irene' ... 'Design by ... Karol!'" Copy editor: "Uh ... sure, whatever, sounds good."

The illustrations in this book are funny and fascinating, though an awful lot of them seem to involve women threatening some kind of self-harm—in case you thought snagging a man was going to be all fun and games:

Page 123~

Her prestige seems to diminish if she tries in any way to please him, whereas it is enhanced when she behaves as though she has conferred an extraordinary favor by granting him the honor of her company.

Ooh, there's a picture that goes with this one, in case you're wondering what such a couple might look like:

~RP

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Paperback 1110: Handbook for the Woman Driver / Charlotte Montgomery (Vanguard nn)

 Paperback 1110: Vanguard (unnumbered) (no ed. stated, 1960)

Title: Handbook for the Woman Driver

Author: Charlotte Montgomery

Cover artist: Elizabeth Pollock + [photo cover]

Condition: 7/10

Value: $8

[from a big box of books sent to me by reader "Gail"]

Best things about this cover: 

• I love the idea that women will naturally be wearing fancy driving gloves while driving. Also, that the steering wheel will be a freestanding plate or disc or fencing mask or robot helmet of some kind. Looks more like someone discovering an ancient artifact than someone driving a car.
• She's giving Eleanor Roosevelt. She also looks kinda like my paternal grandmother.
• Phillips 66 had a cool logo. Sincerely.
• I wonder what kind of assumptions this book makes about women drivers. Let's open to a random page and test the waters, shall we? — "Many women have confessed to me (as if it were a secret vice) [... go on ...] that they sing loud and lustily when they're alone in their cars." Thankfully, Mrs. Montgomery approves. She does not approve, however, of picking up hitchhikers or stopping on a deserted road or dressing or acting in any way that might attract "undue attention." I think she wants to say "don't dress like a whore," but that was probably deemed untactful by the editors.

Best things about this back cover: 

• Trop-Artic! For when the weather is ... too ... ar(c)tic?
• Trop-Artic! Not at all awkward and nonsensical! Really surprised it didn't catch on.
• The corporate synergy of Good Housekeeping and Phillips 66 is really something to behold.
• I love (Love!) how they're selling motor oil to women the way they'd sell beauty cream. Because "every woman" wants a "lubricating formula" (!) to help her car look "younger."
• "*A trademark" is a hilarious footnote. Oh, is that what "Trop-Artic" is? I just though it was an ad exec's bad idea.

Page 123~

Paper Play: Ticktacktoe; drawing a figure in sections, turning back the paper each time to hide what's already been drawn; folding a sheet and cutting strips of dolls. A drawing game for older children is played by making a sketch to illustrate a title, song, event, etc. The first to guess correctly wins.

"Paper Play" sounds like a very ... interesting ... driving kink, but this is just part of a long section on "ways to distract your annoying kids on a long automobile excursion." I like how the author basically invents Pictionary here. But that spelling of "Ticktacktoe" is cursed. 

~RP

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