Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Vivid, Violent, and Varied

It’s been a while since I last heard from Óscar Palmer, the translator and designer behind Es Pop Ediciones, a small Spanish book publisher. In 2010 he released a Spanish translation of Money Shot, Christa Faust’s 2007 novel. A year later, he brought crime-fiction followers a Spanish version of Queenpin, by Megan Abbott, which had also been released originally in 2007. Now Palmer writes to announce the Iberian Peninsula debut of Es Pop’s Arte Salvaje, a high-quality Spanish-language edition of Robert Polito’s acclaimed 1996 work, Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. In addition, he has created an affiliated Web property, which he introduces this way:
… inspired in part by your great blog Killer Covers, we’ve launched  a “companion” Tumblr [page] in which I’ll be posting a Jim Thompson cover every day, up to his first collaborations with true-crime magazines. My goal is to assemble in one site the covers for each American first edition of every Thompson novel, plus an assortment of rarities (Pyramid reprints, Popular Library novelizations, etc.), magazine covers and movie posters. I’m proceeding backwards, with [filmmaker] Michael Winterbottom’s Killer Inside Me as starting point, and we’ve just reached the [19]50s, so we’ll be getting to his Lion books and other prime Thompson materials very soon.
I’m extremely flattered that Palmer should credit Killer Covers with giving him the idea for this new Thompson page. It’s a beauty, to be sure, filled with very familiar--and carefully credited (when possible)--book jackets. I look forward to seeing what he’ll place there next. Click here to see the already posted novel fronts.

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