Paperback 1064: Dell 0562 (1st New Dell Edition, 1972)

"Ernest Luttrell. Son of a North Country parson. Always had a kink of some kind in his moral make-up"

Paperback 1003: Bee-Line 175 (PBO, 1967)

Title: Corinne
Author: King Coral
Cover artist: photo cover

Condition: 7/10
Estimated value: $25-30

[Newest addition to the Doug Peterson Collection]

Best things about this cover:

• Ariel? ... What happened?
• I'm not familiar with the various forms of cantilevering and what not that are used in women's undergarments but that top seems physically impossible
• LOL King Corals' fancy af signature stamp. "I'm an icon! I'm a brand name!" he said to himself as he sat behind the wheel of his Toyota Tercel in the parking lot at the West Covina Safeway ...
• OK that fabric is pretty hot. I would wear a tie with that pattern for sure.

Best things about this back cover:

• "I quit!" said American everyman Pete Diamond. "Sure, whatever," replied his boss.
• TEXAS is a state. NEW ORLEANS is a city. MIAMI ... is in a smaller font for some reason. THE COVER DESIGNER should be fired.
• Pete Diamond sounds like a sex addict / serial killer. I don't know what's protecting Corinne, but she's lucky.

Page 123~

She was laughing now. Suddenly and loudly she'd broken into laughter as though I'd pulled the world's funniest funny.

"Is this how words work?" Pete funnied. "I have nil idea!"

~RP

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Paperback 912: Mentor M44 (1st ptg, 1949)

Title: Coming of Age in Samoa
Author: Margaret Mead
Cover artist: jonas

Estimated value: $10-15

Best things about this cover:

• Striking design. Love the stylized monochrome foliage against the stark white backdrop.
• They seem like they're having fun.
• This probably shouldn't remind me of John Travolta and Uma Thurman dancing in "Pulp Fiction," but it does.
• The most important difference between Samoan society and our own is No Nipples ... For Anyone!

Best things about this back cover:

• I enjoy mentally changing "earnestly" (in Dorsey's review) to "salaciously," "lustily," "hornily," and the like.
• Freud!?
• "The domain of erotics." I want to go to there.
• I read "primitive heart-stirrings" as "primitive heart-strings," because it's nicer.

Page 123~

People forgave her violence and her quarrelsomeness for sheer mirth over her propitiatory antics.

She got away with shit 'cause she was fun to be around and sometimes bought the drinks. (You're welcome)

~RP

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Paperback 910: Signet D2073 (1st ptg, 1962)

Title: The Key
Author: Junichiro Tanizaki
Cover artist: [gah, can anyone make out that signature underneath the noodle bowl?!]

Estimated value: $8-12

Best things about this cover:

• Font Victory! That title is smashing.
• In case you could tell the people on the cover are Japanese ... chopsticks!
• This painting is beautiful yet boring. It really really wants you to believe that the hardcore marital boning inside is tasteful.

Best things about this back cover:

• "It leaves one both roused and afraid." Uh ... TMI, "The Reporter."
• Mid-century was a big time for arguing that books about Doing It could be "art." Like, you had to justify it because of stupid hypocritical censorious America. Note the critical armature on this book's covers. Some kind of Chatterley-related hold-over. "If critics like it, then it's OK to jerk off to."
• Love the author photo. "Just take the fucking picture. You weary me."

Page 123~

All through March I'd written that I was still stubbornly defending the "last line," and I did my best to convince him of it. In fact, it was on March twenty-fifth that I surrendered that last "paper-thin" defense.

It seems like she is talking about "anal sex" but I "can't be sure."

~RP

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Paperback 899: Penguin 611 (1st ptg, 1946)

Title: Messer Marco Polo
Author: Donn Byrne
Cover artist: jonas

Estimated value: $9-12

Best things about this cover:

• Honestly I have no idea what's happening here, on any level.
• The palette, the art, the word "Messer" (!?), it's all so ... uncharacteristic of my smutty collection.
• It looks like he's holding an asp in the crook of his left arm.
• This book represents that stage in Penguin's American publishing when it's about to morph into Penguin-Signet and then, finally, Signet.

Best things about this back cover:

• "Punched cows." That's pretty hardboiled.
• If you google, in quotation marks, ["gang of howling literary brigands"], this book, and only this book, shows up. Joyce Kilmer wrote "Trees." Don Marquis is (by total coincidence) my newest literary crush—he wrote light verse in the voice of a cockroach named Archy (who used no capitals or punctuation because cockroaches can't possibly use the Shift key). His books of Archy verse were often illustrated by the legendary George Herriman (of "Krazy Kat" fame).
• Wait, "Messer Marco Polo brought him fame and fortune"? Can that be right?!
• Car crash. Dang.

Page 23~ (book's only 116 pages long!)

And suddenly there's a headsman in a red cloak and a red mask, and the axe swings and falls. The head pops off and the body falls limp.

Somehow the word "pops" sucks all the seriousness out of the situation.

~RP

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Paperback 653: Dell 4621 (1st ptg, 1966)

Title: Lady Wu
Author: Lin Yutang
Cover artist: (Tom?) Miller

Yours for: $9


Best things about this cover:

• Peach, it turns out, is not my favorite of book colors.
• I love the painting, actually. I like the variation on the common "keyhole" cover. Very much implicates the reader as a voyeur. She's even looking at you semi-accusatorily / seductively. Scene itself is a bit staid, but it's still cool. Just wish it were *bigger* (stupid '60s book designers and their insistence on TEXT over cover art)
• A Buddha statue is not enough for Lady Wu. She must also have live-action Buddha (who smokes?). Also, a male companion dressed like '80s Prince.

Best things about this back cover:

• Ugh. Text.
• NYMPHOMANIAC!
• Still, ugh. Text.

Page 123~

Unfortunately, the leaders of the rebellion were all scholars.

~RP

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Paperback 640: MacFadden Books 60-431 (1st ptg, 1969)

Title: Under Cover of Night
Author: Manning Lee Stokes
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $7


Best things about this cover:

• You must be this tall to ride Manning Lee Stokes.
• Cigarette holders—I don't really get them, but as visual affectations go, I like them a lot.
• I actually really love the arc of the title font.
• There is a reason the show was not called "Mission: Difficult."

Best things about this back cover:

• "Armed with a gut-searing greed"? Uh ... Clean-up on aisle Metaphor!
• The Iron Buddha would be a cool wrestling name.
• The Bloody Cache would not.

Page 123~

Yi Sun-Sin, of course, had Oo working in Seoul, and soon he had known about the American who was coming to find a million buried dollars. And they started making plans. The fact that Oo had been a former houseboy of mine made his chances good.

I'm trying to decide what my favorite part of this passage is: "Oo," "houseboy," or "of course."

~RP

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Paperback 550: World Distributors Novel (no #) (PBO? 1951?)

Title: Yesterday I Died!
Author: John Cooper
Cover artist: Sure, why not...

Yours for: I have no idea ...


Best things about this cover:

• Him: "Yesterday Day I Died!" Her: "So I smell!"
• Gun v. Nipple face-off.
• Has she got an 8 1/2 x 11 pad of paper in her pocket? 
• Awkwardly positioned gunman wonders "Am I in frame now? How 'bout now?"

Best things about this back cover:

• One of three Awesome ads in this thing.
• Charles Atlas promises you "fresh blood" if you join him and his vampiric children of the night.
• "Joy-killing ailments" is a great phrase. 

Other ads!

• The crossword constructor in me really wishes APAL had caught on.
• How is that drawing of that dude supposed to relate to my quitting smoking. Frankly, it's creeping me out and making me want to light up.
• Hey, "S.A.E." — more crosswordy goodness!

• First, I thought it said "I am Bam-Bou!" and thought "awesome name for a guru." Then I thought it said "Make Money By Growing Babies" and thought "that's ... a new angle."
• It's a well-know scientific fact that bamboo release spores in the form of pound coins.
• The Orientalism here is epic—the sexy East will lay bare her secrets to the hungry eyes of the horny West!

Page 123~ (This Book Has No Page Numbers!?!?!)

So ... Random Page~

Lugs O'Malley said suddenly, "For Pete's sake, Champion ... do something. If you're gonna blow us all to hades with the bomb ... well hell, let's go. But don't forget, you go too."

First, give it up for 'Lugs O'Malley,' which belongs in the Corney Gangster Name Hall O' Fame. Second, who says (uncapitalized!?) "hades" in this context? Normally, I would say: the person who thinks "hell" is a curse word. But ... the next sentence ...

~RP

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Paperback 545: Jove 10150-8 (PBO, 1989)

Title: The Marauders
Author: Michael McGann
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $6


Best things about this cover:

• Countdown to a gay porn movie shoot in 5, 4, 3 ...
• Russell Crowe, Joe Piscopo, Some Weasel Face, Eric Roberts, Lorenzo Lamas, and ... That Bald Asian Guy are ... The Marauders!
• If you think those guns aren't cock substitutes, just check out how bachelor #3 is holding his. He's stroking its balls / presenting it to you on a platter / begging you to admire it.
• "We used to have shirts, but our bodies were so hot they just burned away. Now all we wear is this fire-retardant kevlar stuff. Marauders!"
• I want one of these patches to sew onto my ... I'm gonna say 'underwear.'
• "From the Creators [plural] of The Guardians" ... and yet it's written by Michael McGann [singular]. One shape-shifting, multiple-personalitied, gun- and gay-porn-loving guy.
• After a nuclear war, wouldn't these guys be a little ... anti-climactic, actually.

Best things about this back cover:

• Nothing.
• KGB Chairman, ha ha! Good call, 1989. Way to predict the fyooture.
• "There's a first time for everything—especially death" is an unintentionally great line. Pearls of wisdom, compliments of ... The Marauders!

Page 123~

The two men walked out of the car. Jack looked over his shoulder. "Buddha? Can you loan me your rifle for a moment?"

In case you were wondering what they were gonna call That Bald Asian Guy. Now you know.

~RP

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Paperback 542: Signet D1183 (2nd ptg, 1955)

Title: A Many-Splendored Thing
Author: Han Suyin
Cover artist: Stanley Zuckerberg

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• "Frankness"! It's a worldwide phenomenon!
• Jerry begged Suyin for a rematch: "Best two out of three! Come on, please! Oh man, the guys in my arm-wrestling club are never going to let me live this down..."
• Can you splendor (?) other things besides love? Sorrow? Boredom? Pork?
• I am having trouble thinking of clever things to say because I can't get the first verse of this song out of my head:

Best things about this back cover: 

Up these steps came the people I had always known. Not small Cantonese with light bones and clean faces, but squat, ugly people with flattened faces and heavy peasant legs, the varicose veins standing out in twisted knots like a brood of snakes. Men and women, dirty and poor. Nearly every one had a physical defect of some kind or other: harelip, a finger missing, deformed chests; and on all those naked coolie shoulders one could see the large round lumps raised by the pressure of the bamboo pole. 

Paperback 339: Pocket Books 6083 (5th ptg, 1961)

Title: The Case of the Backward Mule
Author: Erle Stanley Gardner
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $6


Best things about this cover:

• A conceptual mess. What century is it? Why is the space princess massaging her scalp, and what does it have to do with bizarrely mustachioed Chinese man on the donkey? No wonder I've never heard of "Terry Clane" and "Inspector Malloy"—how do you expect to get an enduring series off the ground with this muddled a marketing campaign?
• "Behold, as Eva Gabor summons miniature Chinese ghosts from the distant past using the power of her Magic Updo!"
• God, the more I look at this cover, the uglier and sillier it gets. Different colors on all the different (stupid) fonts? I'd cut Everything But The Girl and start over.

Best things about this back cover:

• "Don't touch anything! You're leaving blue fingerprints everywhere!"

Page 123~

"In our business, we don't do too much speculative thinking, Mr. Clane. We investigate. And when we investigate we make it a point to cover all of the possibilities."

"I see."

"Even," Malloy went on, "including that poker-faced Chinese servant of yours, Yat T'oy."

"I see."

~RP

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Paperback 290: Gold Medal s1157 (4th ptg, 1961)

Title: Dagger of Flesh
Author: Richard S. Prather
Cover artist: no idea

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


Best things about this cover:

• As I told Doug the first time he showed this to me: "Dagger of Flesh ... well, that wouldn't be very effective. It would buckle on you every time you tried to use it."
• At first I thought I was looking at a drug-addled couple sitting/lying on a bed. Then I realized they were sitting/lying on the neck of a donkey.
• Why are the man's hands bound by the wimple of a snow leopard with an Asian lady's face?
• I imagine that these two look as wasted as the artist must have been when conceiving / executing this painting.
• Trite tagline! Come on, copy writers! Shell deserves better.

Best things about this back cover:

• Op Art! I am getting dizzy...
• "Like I had no control over my brain" — been there. Am there, frequently.
• "Maybe I did kill Jay" — now now. No one wants to kill Jay himself. Just his mediocre new show.

Page 123~

This is the day, Logan, I thought. Today you get even, maybe. Today you find out what the hell's been going on and fix some bastard's wagon, if you're lucky.

"Fix some bastard's wagon" is pure awesome. I have to start using wagon-fixing as a metaphor for revenge. For real.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

Paperback 170: Award Books A248X (PBO, 1967)

• Title: A Korean Tiger
• Author: Nick Carter (who is also the main character...? and who is also, btw, a Backstreet Boy)
• Cover artist: Some McGinnis imitator

Yours for: $17


Best things about this cover:

• Bring me the floating head of Nick Carter! Oh, nevermind. It's right there.
• The disembodied head of Nick Carter thinks you're a swell-looking doll. {wink!}
• If the book is trying to suggest to me that that lady is "Korean," I challenge. She looks like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, only with somewhat smaller boobs and no shirt.
• I like how she is taking a sidelong glance at the title, as if thinking "WTF?"
• How is it possible that no rapper has picked up the name "Killmaster?" That would be my handle for sure. That, or "Optimum Slim" (a name I derived from the cereal I eat every morning)
• Fake Korean Post-op Elvira Impersonator needs a refill, dammit!

Best things about this back cover.

• Text! Who doesn't like ... that?
• Oh my god, I am in love with this book - any book that features the word "slatternly" is hottt with three t's.
• I hope the "dark underbelly of Asia" is just some really hairy Laotian guy.
• Paragraph indentations are for suckas!

Page 123~

The wide green stare did not waver. Behind those basilisk eyes he thought he could detect a hint of something warmer. Desire? Plain old-fashioned lust? Was this creature really so human?

Oh please dear god don't let him be talking about the "Korean" woman. "Though she was Korean, she seemed oddly human."

~RP

P.S. this book is immaculate. As crisp and new and bright as the day it first hit the shelves. Maybe there's a tiny amount of scuffing, but it's quite negligible. Paperbacks rarely hold up this well.

Paperback 95: Berkley Medallion S1564 (PBO, 1968)

Title: Come Be My O.R.G.Y.
Author: Ted Mark
Cover artist: Sidney Booblover (I mean, "uncredited")

Yours for: $13


Best things about this cover:

• Possibly the silliest title name in my entire collection.
• Q: How can a cover featuring so much breast flesh be so ugly? (A: urine-hued aura)
• I like to imagine that all these people on the cover are actually the same person, and we are seeing all of his/her different incarnations. Together, the four of them could all be each other's O.R.G.Y.
• If you have not heard of "The Man from O.R.G.Y." before, then I defy you to figure out what it stands for. (I'll reveal the answer in the near future) [A: Organization for the Rational Guidance of Youth]
  
• Smirky McDickerson there in the front is inspiring me to create a new Post Label: Douchebag Detectives. I know of at least one other candidate ... with thousands of books awaiting write-ups, I am confident there are more.
  
• "Steve Victor! ... anyone? No?"
• I can only hope that he is putting that shirt on.
  

Best things about this back cover:

• "Seriously, come be my O.R.G.Y."
• This guy clearly smells of gin, cigarettes, and self-loathing.
• "That delectable Tibetan" - Is her name really some mock-Asian version of "teeny bopper!?!?" Is it wrong that I hope "Steve" dies at the end (or, even better, the beginning) of this book?

PAGE 123 - is not nearly as good as PAGE 81~

She scrambled over my body until we were juxtaposed and her long blonde hair trailed over my thighs. That old Roman dinner gong had rung [ed.: ...?]. The feast of her nether chamber was spread before me and I raised up to sample its feverish honey. She responded by engulfing my edible root and I became dizzy with the delights provided by her womb at the top.

After reading that, I'm not sure I'll ever be able to eat a root again. The jury's still out on honey ...

~RP

Paperback 32: Dell 144 (1st ptg, 1947)

Title: The White Brigand
Author: Edison Marshall
Cover artist: Uncredited


Best things about this cover:

• From the man who brought you "Great Smith" (seriously - same guy) comes ... "The White Brigand!"
• This book raises the question: What color are brigands normally?
• This novel appears to be set in China somewhere. I wonder how the natives will be depicted by Mr. Marshall. Hmm ... let's see. Just opened this book to a random page and the first word I saw was: "slant-eyed." Nice.
  
• You don't really see the word "Brigand" much these days. I always thought it meant someone who is lawless, violent, at least vaguely piratic - yes, a member of a band of thieves.
• The floating, glowing, jade pseudo-Buddha alien tiki is more than a little disturbing. First, he has jointless, perhaps even boneless limbs. Second, he has the world's shortest pigtails. That, or his head has both a positive and a negative terminal. Third, he appears to be made of plutonium. Fourth, his toothless grin will haunt my dreams tonight and possibly forever. I could go on.

Best things about this back cover:

• This is the first of many Dell "mapbacks" that we will see over the course of my paperback project. All early Dell paperbacks (or nearly all) featured a map on the back cover that depicted some scene in the book. This one is pretty crudely drawn, as mapbacks go, but it's still cool.
• Any book that features both a "reliquary" and a "chasm" can't be all bad, I say.
• Do we really need to be told that that is a "cliff?"

RP

Paperback 26: Avon Books 245 (1st ptg, 1950)

Title: The Big Four
Author: Agatha Christie
Cover artist: Uncredited


"Steve Manley really, really hated to lose at chess..."

Best things about this cover:

• The Floating Head of Fu Manchu! - and check out the Asian-y lettering on the title. You can almost hear the gong.
  
• Chloroform - you don't see that on paperback covers nearly enough. Usually it's all guns and knives with these guys. Nice to see someone mixing up the violence.
• Again, I have to ask, who dresses these people? She's decked out for some kind of fiesta, while he appears ready for Jeeves to bring him his pipe.
  
• A pinkish robe with quilted cuffs and collar? And a white handkerchief with matching ascot? His far-off gaze suggests he's being controlled by the Floating Head of Fu Manchu. Maybe he's chloroforming the woman because she dared mock the fancy bedtime garb that is sacred to the Head.
  

RP