Curious Catalogue of Carnality

This is a Bee-Line original paperback cover from 1970 that I ultimately found impossible not to make use of on this page. I mean, really, as a book lover (and that description sounds a bit more salacious in this context than in most), how could the front from Les Tucker’s Nympho Librarian not send my blood surging?

A Los Angeles friend of mine, author Gary Phillips, recently passed Nympho Librarian’s artwork along with the slug, “Best. Cover. Ever.” It had been used to illustrate a piece in The Paris Review from earlier this year, in which contributor Avi Steinberg recounted the sordid history of library sex fantasies. He began that essay thusly:

Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually defining relationship—it was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth century who coined the word pornography. So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most at home in books. Each year, new titles are added to the librarian-porn bookshelf. This past season’s crop included additions like Hot for Librarian by Anastasia Carrera; Lucy the Librarian--Dewey and His Decimal by John and Shauna Michaels; The Nympho Librarian and Other Stories by Chrissie Bentley and Jenny Swallows; A Librarian’s Desire by Ava Delaney, author of the Kinky Club series; and soft-core selections like Sweet Magik by Penny Watson. The conventions of the form--the dimly lit stacks, the librarian’s mask of thick glasses and hair tied into a bun, et cetera--are, of course, well known. Unlike video porn, where these conventions are typically used as a wholesale substitute for narrative, porn books still feel the compulsion to tell a story, to make the glasses and bun mean something. I was curious just what story these new books were telling. What does our most current version of the librarian fantasy say about us? To answer this question, I visited the library.

You’ll find the remainder of Steinberg’s essay here.

I haven’t been able to learn much about author Les Tucker (who penned other books such as Freak-Out Party! and Every Night, Lover). But responsibility for the steamy cover of Nympho Librarian lies with the better-recognized (Isaac) Paul Rader (1906-1986), who perpetrated a tremendous quantity of paperback artistry during the 1960s, particularly for a soft-porn publisher called Midwood. Although I haven’t yet written much about Rader, I owe his memory a more thorough going-over in the near future.

READ MORE: “Sex in the Stacks: Porn and the Librarian,” by Stephanie Brown (The Best American Poetry).

Bogus Bookshelf Bounty

In March of this year, I alerted readers to a new feature on the art, culture, and photography site Zoom Street. Editor Derek Pell said he’d created a pictorial series of 100 “missing mysteries”--“rare books you never knew existed.” These were in fact crime and mystery novel jackets of Pell’s pure and clever imagining, each of which was accompanied by a spurious story description.

After only a few installments, though, the series seemed to run out of gas. “I’d stopped posting them, as the response was rather underwhelming,” Pell told me in a recent e-note.

But fortunately, the Missing Mysteries are missing no more.

Pell posted a number of new covers just yesterday, all of which can be seen here. They include everything from Murder Is a Four-Letter Word, by Dashiell Hammett, and The 40 Steps, by John Buchan (“the notorious sequel to The 39 Steps), to Eric Ambler’s Bankster and Brett Halliday’s No Restroom in the Boneyard, Baby. These are all kinds of fun, well worth checking out when you have a free moment.

Can You Spot the Differences?

Why has there been such a need, over the years, to “clean up” Robert McGinnis’ original artwork for the James Bond movie series? Examples here, here, and here.

The Sincerest Form of ... What?

I’ve often written in my main blog, The Rap Sheet, about “copycat book covers,” those that employ the same (usually stock) images on their jackets as have been used previously elsewhere, either unknowingly or in expectation that busy readers won’t notice or be bothered by the replication.

But Rob Mallows of The Deighton Dossier, an excellent blog devoted to the work of spy novelist and military historian Len Deighton, brings to my attention a duplication of a quite different order.

The image atop this post shows the famous black-and-white, 1962 cover for Deighton’s The IPCRESS File, designed for British publisher Hodder & Stoughton by the late Raymond Hawkey. Now, compare that with “a virtually identical jacket” appearing on the Scottish paperback edition of Harry Lipkin, P.I., the new novel by Barry Fantoni (released in the States as Harry Lipkin, Private Eye). That Fantoni edition comes from Birlinn, “one of the largest independent publishers in Scotland.”

While this case of duplication might be called an homage, nobody thinks it was coincidence. “[Birlinn] would, one imagines, have known what they were doing,” writes Mallows, “and this appears like a--admittedly, quite clever--bid for press coverage by this Scottish publisher, working to the maxim ‘all publicity is good publicity’. After all, I’m writing about it; designers are up in arms; it’s in the news.”

And now I’m writing about it.

I guess the publicity tactic has worked, if that was the point.

Still, the decision to “borrow” Hawkey’s concept for Harry Lipkin, P.I. (without even crediting Hawkey’s original concept) has kicked up “a bitter row” in UK publishing circles. As The Guardian reports:

Hawkey’s widow, Mary Hawkey, Deighton’s biographer, Edward Milward-Oliver, and a number of Hawkey’s contemporaries have branded the jacket a rip-off and asked for its withdrawal, condemning it as “shameful” and “outrageous”.

Mary Hawkey calls the jacket “plagiarism”. “I can’t tell you how distressed I am on seeing such an obvious copy of Ray’s work. He was extraordinarily generous with, and encouraging towards, young graphic designers, but I believe he would have been appalled and angered by such a naked, barefaced copying.”

It’s obviously impossible to know Hawkey’s reaction to all of this; he died in 2010. Yet other designers have reacted with outrage, and at least one of them--Mike Dempsey, a former art director at two leading UK publishing houses--has called on fellow designers to “lodge an e-mail protest to the publishers with the message:

“STOP THE HARRY LIPKIN P.I. JACKET, IT HAS RIPPED OFF RAYMOND HAWKEY'S WORK!”

Dempsey opines in his blog that Birlinn “should send a letter of apology to Mary Hawkey and a design fee for their lamentable copy of Ray’s cover. There is a delicate line between paying homage and ripping off. This effort falls wildly over the latter.”

We shall see if anything comes of such protests. I won’t bet on it.

READ MORE: “Raymond Hawkey--A Personal Note from Edward Milward-Oliver” (The Deighton Dossier).

“Girl,” Interpreted

Erle Stanley Gardner’s more than 80 Perry Mason novels have gone through so many editions over the decades, it’s fun sometimes just to trace the evolution of a single title through its various cover treatments. In this post, Pulp International catalogues seven versions of The Case of the Sulky Girl, the second Mason novel (after The Case of the Velvet Claws), originally published in 1933.

READ MORE: “Putting Up a Good Front,” by J. Kingston Pierce
(The Rap Sheet).

Sweet Young Swamp Things

I don’t usually associate shadowy bogs and bayous and backwoods ponds with beautiful babes. But many illustrators of old-time paperback books apparently had different ideas. Pulp International offers an impressive selection of “swamp denizens,” with artwork by Robert Maguire, Mitchell Hooks, Barye Phillips, and others.

If You Can’t Make It, Fake It

We’re so often treated to collections of bad book fronts (such as these), that it can be hard to choose which really deserve that label. But some of these might at least be in the running.

Furthermore, it’s sad when even some phoney covers, such as these, would be more welcome on shelves than those cited above.