“In the early years of mass-market paperbacks, there was a considerable bias against white backgrounds,” writes Ed Hulse in his outstanding 2021 study, The Art of Pulp Fiction. “Objections to them were lodged most forcefully by retailers, distributors, and publishers’ sales reps. It was believed that frequently handled books with white covers would show grease smudges from dirty fingers, diminishing their visual appeal and perhaps rendering them unsaleable. This prejudice vanished almost overnight with Bantam’s 1967 release of Robert Rimmer’s The Harrad Experiment and William Goldman’s Boys and Girls Together, phenomenal best-sellers with white-background covers. Suddenly, every other paperback release had one.”
Interestingly, the late James Bama created the art for that softcover edition of The Harrad Experiment (a novel that had appeared in hardcover a year before). And he would go on to produce more than three dozen additional white-background covers for Bantam Books. As this series rolls on, we’ll encounter more of those. But today, I’m showing off just two such paperback fronts, both from James M. Cain novels—The Postman Always Rings Twice (above) and Mildred Pierce (below)—and both published, like Harrad, in 1967.
No comments:
Post a Comment