Random Discoveries

While I was putting together a rather lengthy news compilation yesterday for The Rap Sheet, I came across a few tidbits that deserve to be mentioned on this page, instead:

• Pulp International has assembled a rather terrific themed collection of vintage paperback façades, all of which feature “one figure looming menacingly in the foreground as a second cowers in the triangular negative space created by the first’s spread legs. This pose is so common,” the blog remarks, “it should have a name. We’re thinking ‘the alpha,’ because it signifies male dominance and because of the a-shape the pose makes.”

• Speaking of themes, when was the last time you checked out Existential Ennui’s page of “Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s”? Blogger Nick Jones points out that it now contains “well over 100 dust jackets,” including fronts by artists such as Val Biro, Sheila Perry, Craig Dodd (I dearly love his artwork for the 1969 Hodder & Stoughton edition of Richard Stark’s The Dame), Kenneth Farnhill, Donald Green, and Denis McLoughlin.

• Jones also directs our attention to this provocative front from the 1960 Midwood Books edition of All the Girls Were Willing, by Alan Marshall (aka Donald E. Westlake).

• And though Edward Gorey may not be remembered best for illustrating the covers of other people’s books, he certainly did some splendid work of that sort.