Fixed in Posts

• New York City-born Tom Lovell (1909-1997) was really a magazine illustrator and a painter of Western scenery, rather than a book-jacket artist. So, though I’ve seen examples of his elegant work in Pulp Covers and elsewhere online (here, for instance, and here), he hasn’t been a principal focus of my interest. However, there’s a handsome new, limited-edition volume about his work due for release in October, titled simply Tom Lovell—Illustrator (The Illustrated Press), and I may just have to add it to my library. The book carries a $44.95 cover price, but judging by its contents—which you can flip through here—that charge doesn’t seem so very exorbitant.

• Robert McGinnis fans, take note: The now 90-year-old artist is creating a whole new line of retro covers for paperback re-releases of Neil Gaiman’s novels, at the author’s request. The first one, gracing American Gods—rushed into print in advance of the 2017 Starz TV adaptation of that 2001 yarn—is due out in mid-August from William Morrow. You can appreciate its artwork on the right. After seeing the results here, author Duane Swierczynski (Revolver) wrote on Facebook that it “guarantees that … I’ll be buying my Neil Gaiman books all over again.”

• Not being a regular (or even irregular) reader of “swashbuckling space fantasies,” I might never have spotted Nathan Long’s 2012 novel, Jane Carver of Waar (Night Shade Books), had it not been for the blog Thinking About Books, which I stumbled across only recently. It showcased Jane Carver of Waar a while back, and made clear in the course of things that its dramatic cover illustration, by Dave Dorman, is a “cleaned-up” version of the artist’s original topless painting. You can compare the two versions more easily in this post from Pulp Covers, which elsewhere offers the no-less-“sanitized” front from Long’s sequel, Swords of Waar (2012).

• In his blog, Pretty Sinister Books, writer and bookseller J.F. Norris features a handsome gallery of Holt Mystery novels, all published between 1939 and 1941. Probably my favorite of those shown is Murder’s Coming, a 1939 novel by Donald Clough Cameron.

• And of course, what would one of these links compilations be without mention of some post or other in Pulp International? Especially worth seeing there recently have been this seductive cover from the 1962 sleaze novel Wait Your Turn (its artwork uncredited) and this Robert Maguire-painted front for the 1954 paperback original The Blonde on the Street Corner, by David Goodis.