The Weepings and the Laughters
I bought Viva King’s autobiography, The Weeping and the Laughter, on the strength of a single review: “How pleasant to know Viva King even if it only be at second-hand through this candid and amusing …
Covers
John Lodwick, a Forgotten Novelist: Covers and Reviews
A look this week at the many novels of John Lodwick, a prolific writer who died at 43 from injuries after an auto accident in 1959. Anthony Burgess once said he started writing with the …
A Cavalcade of Joan Butler Covers
For over three decades, P. G. Wodehouse had stiff competition for the shillings of English readers looking for a good comic novel: Joan Butler. At the rate of roughly one a year, Stanley Paul published …
Murder City, by O. M. Hall (Oakley Hall) (1949)
Murder City was Oakley Hall’s first novel, published under the name of “O. M. Hall.” Although Hall came to be known as the dean of Western writers, particularly based on his 1958 novel, Warlock, he …
You Can’t Tell a Belmont Book by Looking at the Cover
Lurid covers full of sexual innuendos and implications of violence were the primary marketing tool for cheap paperback books back in the 1950s and 1960s, and few publishers were more lurid and cheaper in their …
Christmas Eve, by Alistair Cooke (1952)
Christmas Eve collects three of Alistair Cooke’s Christmas-time stories from his legendary BBC “Letters from America” broadcast. I listened to the audiobook version of the collection, Letters from America, 1946-1004, recently, and saddened at the …
Selected Modern Short Stories, edited by Alan Steele (1937)
Selected Modern Short Stories–the first of several collections that editor Alan Steele compiled for Penguin in the late 1930s–offers a good illustration of the random nature of literary fate. Let’s take at look at the …
Croatian Tales of Long Ago, by Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić (1922)
One day late, but in keeping with the spirit of Halloween, which reminds us each year of the didactic benefits of scaring the crap out of kids, I want to celebrate a fine example of …
Paperbacks from the Montana Valley Bookstore
A visit to the Montana Valley Bookstore in Alberton, Montana, has been one of my rituals during our annual stay in Missoula, but this year events put books and many other things on hold. I …
Popular Library’s “That’s So ’70s” Take on Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage
As I mentioned in my introductory post on Pilgrimage, there have been five editions in which the complete set of chapters/novels were published: A four-volume set with 12 chapters/novels, from J. M. Dent and Cresset …
The Visitors, by Mary McMinnies (1958)
The odd, alien green tint of the cover of the U.S. edition of Mary McMinnie’s second novel, The Visitors is somehow appropriate for this long out-of-print book, for it manages to be, at the same …
The Drunk, the Damned and the Bedevilled, by Terence Ford
The cover of The Drunk, the Damned, and the Bedevilled is chock full of all that is good in pulp fiction: sex, violence, alcohol and weirdness. The weirdness comes in part from the rather odd …
Classic Covers from Claude Kendall Books
I recently picked up a first (and only) edition of Felix Riesenberg’s 1933 novel, Mother Sea, and was intrigued to see that it came from Claude Kendall, the same publisher that issued some of Tiffany …
There’s One in Every Town, by James Aswell
“Completing engrossing on every page,” proclaims a plug by Erskine Caldwell on the cover of the Signet paperback edition of James Aswell’s short novel, There’s One in Every Town (1951). It appears beneath a James …
Breaking Up, by W. H. Manville
I was tempted to tag this post Justly Neglected?, as Breaking Up, W. H. Manville’s 1962 bizarre novel of obsessively apathetic love is really quite bad. But out of respect for the fine work of …
Keeper of the Flame, by I. A. R. Wylie
This Popular Library edition of I. A. R. Wylie’s 1942 novel, Keeper of the Flame, dates from the early 1960s. There are some remarkable titles to be found among the best-sellers, bodice-rippers, and dreck that …
Crack of Doom, by Hugh Edwards
Cover of US first edition of Crack of Doom, the third and, apparently, last novel by Hugh Edwards. Edwards’ first book, All Night at Mr Stanyhurst’s, was called “the finest short novel since Conrad,” and …