Fortunately, I’ve never had to spend much time in hospitals, except on those rare occasions when one of my friends of relatives needs a repair or adjustment of some sort. But it’s impossible to grow up around television and film portrayals of nurses, and not get the (probably erroneous) impression that some of them boast rather more libidinous bedside manners than the rest.
Certainly that’s the suggestion in the two paperback book covers above. The one on the left comes from Nurse Carolyn, a 1960 Midwood release credited to “Loren Beauchamp,” but actually written by Robert Silverberg, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science-fiction novelist. As the blog Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books explains, “Nurse Carolyn is a somewhat dark tale of a naïve young nurse in white, Carolyn Wright, taken down the dark path of wealth and S/M.” What redeems this example of trash-lit, of course, is its beautiful cover, which was painted by the great Paul Rader.
Meanwhile, on the top-right, we see the jacket from Naked Nurse, a 1963 Chariot Books publication by Ben Anderton (who also produced such salacious stand-bys as 1961’s Wild Oats and 1963’s Love Peeper). This work would undoubtedly have turned many a male reader’s head when it was still available on sales racks, not only because of its captivating, Robert Maguire-illustrated cover, but because of the brief description of its plot, found on the back: “Here is a novel completely different in its shocking, penetrating treatment of the excesses behind closed doors of a big city hospital.”
Maybe a hospital stay has its benefits, after all.
1 comment:
Very cool covers. And I love finding out about another Robert Silverberg pseudonym and book I was unaware of. Thanks!
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