Sunday, April 24, 2011

JACKET REQUIRED: Gorgeous Ghouls

Beginning a new weekly (or fairly frequently) feature today. I've mentioned before the numerous logs and websites that celebrate pulp magazine and paperback cover art. Here's my contribution. It - of course - my tribute to the lost art of dust jacket art. They call them dust wrappers in the U.K., but I'm glad we call them dust jackets. It allowed for an excellent feature nickname.

Be sure to click on the images to enlarge and better appreciate them.






5 comments:

  1. These are fabulous. The exception is the last one, where the hunchback, who I presume we are to find frightening, merely looks as if he's inadvertently opened the bathroom door on a house guest.

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  2. Glad you liked this. I couldn't resist a touch of irony with the androgynous hunchback. I can't tell if it's an old man or woman. And he (if it's a he) is hardly gorgeous.

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  3. Marvellous covers - if only the content of the books could live up to any of them!

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  4. Sergio -

    Of the books shown above, all of which I owned at one time or another, I read only The Vampire of N'Gobi. It's a lost race adventure novel by a British writer who mainly wrote westerns set in America. There was no real vampire of the bloodsucking variety. The word is used in the 1920s slang way (usually reduced to vamp) and describes the queen of the lost city the hero discovers somewhere in what was once known as Rhodesia. I remember the style being turgid and the story only interesting in the middle portion. The rest, as you might have guessed, is rather forgettable.

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  5. These make present-day jackets look like pretty weak tea.

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