PULP FICTION THURSDAY

It's time for a new regular feature here at the Adrastos Virtual Cafe. I've long been interested in some of the amazing and often tawdry artwork that they used on paperback book covers in the Fifties and Sixties. It was a high period for American design of all kinds from Harley Earl's cars for GM to the emerging pop art of Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and others too many to recall and I don't feel like using the Google or going wacky on the wiki right now.

Back to pulp fiction book covers. They were often employed to induce people to shell out for utter crapola like this: 

Obviously dirty books cost more; most pocket books were a dime or a quarter back then. Satan also looks like a dude but who am I to quibble with classic rubbish? 

Some of the most interesting pulpy covers were placed on literary fiction to increase their sales. William Faulkner once said that he made more from paperbacks with racy covers than from anything else except his movie work with Howard Hawks. I give you a sampler of the Faulkner pocketbook collection:

Pylon is one of the few novels Faulkner wrote that was not set in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. (Dang, I'm tired after typing that.) He set it in a place called New Valois, which was a thinly veiled version of New Orleans. It was inspired by his time here when he lived at Pirate's Alley in the Quarter.  It's not one of his better efforts but it's a helluva lot better than the 1958 movie version Tarnished Angels, which was directed by sudsmeister Douglas Sirk.

And they filmed it, albeit badly, so it plays as high camp: Stack is genuinely butch and Rock tries his best. But the movie collapses under the weight of all the melodrama, which was overwraught and not mellow at all. And you thought I could get this without a single pun; as if...

Finally, one more Faulkner book cover. This one is actually reasonably accurate and less OTT but it's a swell pulp fiction image nonetheless: 

tags: popart  pulpfiction  literature  faulkner  nola  movies  

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