Best Face Forward

Nathan Cain of Independent Crime knows how fond I am of vintage “paperback porn”—jacket fronts of a more than subtly seductive nature—so when he points to a new catalogue of such art on the Web, as he did yesterday, he can rest assured that I’ll visit the site without noticeable delay.

Responsible for this latest trove is William Smith of Hang Fire Books, “an online bookseller located in Park Slope, Brooklyn.” He’s put together a generous collection at Flickr of what he calls “Sex/Cheesecake/Good Girl Art”—mid-20th-century, illustrated covers for books such as Give the Little Corpse a Great Big Hand (1953), by George Bagby; I’m Cannon for Hire (1958), by Curt Cannon (aka Ed McBain); Assignment: Mara Tirana (1960), by Edward S. Aarons; Anything But Saintly (1963), by Richard Deming; and The White Bikini (1963), by Carter Brown. Many of these are crime-fiction titles, but there are also several early lesbian novels (1960’s A Twilight Affair, by James Harvey, for instance) and others that were obviously designed to titillate shoppers (1961’s The Window, by Leonard Huish; 1962’s Triangle of Lust, by Fletcher Bennett; and 1963’s Never Leave My Bed, by Joel Townsley Rogers). Smith says he already has 170 of his “favorite pulp fiction” jackets in his online collection, but “will add to it regularly.”

This makes an excellent companion to Bill Crider’s own Flickr albums of men’s action novel jackets and covers by the great paperback illustrator Robert McGinnis.