Hat tip to George Kelley.
Sunday, October 09, 2011
7 Sexy Crime Book Covers
Charles Ardai: Design Friday: 7 Sexy Crime Book Covers: Back in the 1940s and 50s, there was an explosion in the popularity of paperback crime novels, triggered mainly by the success of Mickey Spillane's first Mike Hammer opus, "I, The Jury" (You think Harry Potter's huge, or "The Da Vinci Code?" Hammer had them both beat. At one point, seven of the 15 best-selling books of all time were Spillane novels). To cash in on Spillane's success, competing paperback lines sprang up, each trying to outdo the others with lurid, sexy, painted covers and titles like "Say It With Bullets" or "Kiss My Fist!" The pulp fiction style sold millions of books and remained popular for several decades before finally petering out from a glut of material and the changing tastes of readers.
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3 comments:
Yup, Bill.
We seem to have retreated from that in your face style of marketing.
And then there was that author with what? 4 billion books in print? Oh yeah, Richard Prather and the Shel Scott tongue-in-cheek series!
It pains me to see cover design credited on the backs of most books when the biggest job a lot of them do is choose a typeface for the author's name. Is this a 40-hour-a-week job?
How can they say pulp fiction has petered out? They must not have seen the latest from Duane Swiercynski, Anthony Neil Smith, or a host of others. Typical Huffington Post idiocy.
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