Ready for a Summertime Release

This last Sunday, June 20, brought us not only Father’s Day, but also 2021’s summer solstice—the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere. This has been a rough year, though nowhere near so difficult (and lonely) as 2020, and everybody could use a break from pandemic restrictions. While the United States has impressed the rest of the world with its aggressive campaign to curtail the disastrous spread of COVID-19, led by President Joe Biden and his still-new administration, the country has still not eradicated that contagion. So we must all still exercise some care when gathering amongst other people, many of whom may not be vaccinated against the virus. Nonetheless, the longer days of this brighter season give us all hope that better times are in the offing.

Over the last dozen years, Killer Covers has built up a rather impressive collection of summertime paperback fronts. You can enjoy those here. Meanwhile, I have embedded yet another example of the breed above. It comes from the 1962 Beacon Signal edition of Sun, Sex and Frenzy, by Francis Loren. The tale sounds like one ideal for beach reading. Here’s the backside synopsis: “Carol and Walt Mahon came to Fort Lauderdale on business—or so they thought! They learned—too late—that this torrid town can tear any marriage apart—with raw temptation! Nobody could teach these kids anything—and nobody could stop them from their own wild brand of love-making!” Credit for the cover artwork has been given to Al Rossi.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make a gin-and-tonic and retire to my front porch for some late-afternoon summer reading.

All Alone, with Trouble in Mind

Book titles containing the word “widow” suddenly seem to be everywhere on my radar. March brought the publication of Alma Katsu’s “gripping, authentic spy procedural,” Red Widow (Putnam), and earlier this month saw the re-release (by Cutting Edge Books) of Louis Lorraine’s 1961 sleaze classic, Commuter Widow. Soon after I downloaded the inarguably not-safe-for-work front cover of that new Commuter Widow edition, I had cause to search for it again in my computer files … and came up with a slew of attractive vintage novels also featuring “widow” in their names.

I’m sorry to say that I don’t know the name of the artist whose remarkable work fronts the 1958 Crest printing of Richard Wormser’s The Widow Wore Red, shown above. But I can identify the painters of most of the paperback covers below, from Bill George (Black Widow, 1954) and Harry Barton (both the undated Exciting Widow and the yarn from which it swiped its art, 1963’s That Kind of Widow) to Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka (Self-Made Widow, 1958, and 1963’s The Torrid Widow), Bob Hilbert (1953’s Night at the Mocking Widow), and Robert McGinnis (the undated Suddenly a Widow, by George Harmon Coxe, and 1966’s No Tears from the Widow, by Carter Brown).

Charles Copeland gave us the cover for Rick Holmes’ New Widow (1963), while Weekend Widows (1966) boasts a front painted by Al Rossi, and Paul Rader is credited with creating the image for Wayward Widow (1962). You’re looking at Clark Hulings’ work on 1957’s The Golden Widow, James Meese’s artistry decorating 1957 Pocket release of Ursula Curtiss’ The Widow’s Web, and the talents of Mort Engel showcased on the 1965 Ace version of that same Curtiss tale. Finally, Griffith Foxley was responsible for the painting that introduces the 1954 Dell release of Dolores Hitchens’ Widows Won’t Wait (a singularly Erle Stanley Gardner-ish title); Mitchell Hooks was behind the 1955 Bantam cover of The Widow and the Web, by Robert Martin; and the great Walter Popp imagined the candelabra-wielding redhead on Evelyn Bond’s Widow in White (1973).

Click on any of the images here for an enlargement.

READ MORE: “Review: The Widow,” by Steven J. McDermott (Mostly Old Books and Rust).

The Heat Is On: Summer Widow

Celebrating the delights of summer. Click here for the full set.



Summer Widow, by Florence Stonebraker (Beacon, 1961).
Illustration by Al Rossi.

Nymphs Just Wanna Have Fun

News broke late last week that the skeleton of a 13-year-old girl, who’d been dead for some 12,000 to 13,000 years, was discovered by scientists in an underwater cave off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. When I read in Slate that the divers who found this long-missing miss named her Naia--Greek for “water nymph”--it brought to mind how many novel titles over the years have contained the word “nymph” (or a provocative variation on that noun).

The gallery featured below hardly exhausts this theme, but it includes some fine examples of “nymph” tales. Plus cover illustrations by a variety of notable 20th-century artists.

Credit for painting the captivating, 1963 façade of Nymph in Suburbia (a work that also belongs among this collection) goes to Al Brule, while Paul Rader was responsible for the artwork on both the ’63 Midwood edition of Sea Nymph, by Peggy Swenson (a pseudonym employed by Richard E. Geis), and the 1968 edition of Reluctant Nympho, by Joan Ellis. The front of John Carver’s Campus Nymphs (Beacon, 1964) is credited to Al Rossi, while the illustration introducing the 1963 Signet edition of Nymph to the Slaughter, by Carter Brown, came from the talented hands of Robert McGinnis (who later produced an even more beautiful cover for that same novel); Harry Barton created the front of Midwood’s 1968 Campus Nympho/Ex-Virgin two-fer; Robert Bonfils did the artwork for Boudoir Nymph (Ember Library, 1966) and $1,000 Nymph (Merit, 1962); and Britain’s Sam Peffer, aka Peff, provided the painting of a woman for the 1958 Pan edition of The Case of the Negligent Nymph, by Erle Stanley Gardner. Finally, Fred Fixler gave us the fronts for both Beat Nymph (Brandon House, 1965), another sexy concoction by Swenson/Geis, and Nympho Twins, a 1977 Casino Books release by Jeff David. (One other work that might have fit right in with Nympho Twins was previously showcased here.)

Click on any of these images to open an enlargement.

Nude in the Sand, by John Burton Thompson

I’ve been very impressed by the efforts of blogger Robert Deis, aka Subtropic Bob, to catalogue the numerous 20th-century book and magazine covers on which blonde model Eva Lynd appeared. Impressed enough to already have written one piece here, and to now revisit the subject. His latest post on Lynd highlights John Burton Thompson’s Nude in the Sand, which was published by Beacon in 1959 and featured the model in a cover illustration by Al Rossi.

To learn (much) more about Lynd and her remarkable career, check out all of Deis’ posts on the subject in Men’s Pulp Mags.

Sex Sells. And Well, Indeed.

Rosa Is for Romance hosts a gallery of sexy work by Al Rossi, who’s described as “a prolific book and magazine illustrator during the 1940s to 1960s. He was the original cover artist of Junkie, the novel William Burroughs published under the pen-name of William Lee. He was also one of the main cover artists for Beacon.”

One fine book jacket that blog doesn’t happen to include, though, appeared on the 1953 Bantam edition of Air Bridge, by Hammond Innes, “a novel of crime and fanatic courage in the shadow of the Berlin Air Lift.” Click here to see the artwork.

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While we’re on the subject of sex, note that the Men’s Pulp Mags blog addresses what someone far fonder of cheesiness than I might call “The Singular Scandal of the Stripped Nazi Sex Slaves.”