Instances of Exhibitionism

While I prepare some new Killer Covers postings, please take the time to visit two covers-oriented features elsewhere on the Web.

• In Pulp International, we’re offered a lucky 13 “pulp covers featuring armed women.” The blog explains that it’s especially fond of book fronts in which “the women are directing their attention toward the viewer. Since pulp is read primarily by men, such illustrations speak implicitly about a man’s thwarted expectations, and conversely of threatened women turning the tables to become empowered.” Among the illustrators represented in Pulp International’s collection are James Avati, Robert Maguire, Harry Schaare, Rudolph Belaski, and Harry Barton.

• Meanwhile, Nick Jones of Existential Ennui has assembled a “permanent, ever-expanding ... gallery page of some of the most gorgeous British dust jackets ever to wrap around books in the 1950s and 1960s, especially crime and spy thrillers and science fiction.” Classic works by Patricia Highsmith, Nevil Shute, Donald E. Westlake, and Geoffrey Household are included. My favorite of the bunch, though, is artist Peter Probyn’s front for the 1962 edition of Time Is an Ambush, by Francis Clifford. Gorgeous!