{"id":2590,"date":"2015-10-08T14:56:56","date_gmt":"2015-10-08T19:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/coolathoole\/?p=2590"},"modified":"2016-01-28T16:54:33","modified_gmt":"2016-01-28T22:54:33","slug":"the-bad-bad-girls-of-pulp-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/coolathoole\/2015\/10\/08\/the-bad-bad-girls-of-pulp-art\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bad, Bad Girls of Pulp Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not a lot of rare book collections boast as many paperbacks as we have. That’s mostly for good reasons — they’re not collectible editions, and they’re much more fragile than hardback volumes. But those collections don’t know what they’re missing. Paperback books can also tell the story of the culture that produced them, and it’s often a different story than their more built-to-last brethren.<\/p>\n

Today, we’re going to take a look at the sexed-up art that began to invade paperbacks in the 1930s. Taking their cues from the covers of pulp magazines — those cheap vehicles of sensational mystery, horror, and sci-fi stories — they used dramatic descriptions and attention-grabbing images, often of scantily clad women, to sell\u00a0novels in a variety of genres. These examples range from 1947 to 1961, the height of the pulp epidemic.<\/p>\n

Click on any image below to see a larger version.<\/p>\n

Mystery and Detective Fiction<\/h2>\n

Since a lot of mystery and hard-boiled detective fiction writers wrote for pulp magazines, and some of their novels actually began their lives as short stories in those publications, dangerous women\u00a0make a really reasonable choice for cover art.<\/p>\n