Inspired by Maughta (and excuse me may I say Yo? if you want to know what not to read, Maughta has an entire very funny blog basically devoted to the subject), I had a quick flip through my small collection of pulp paperbacks with covers too campy to pass up, and present to you this gem.
Copyright 1961, Things With Claws is a short story collection edited by Whit and Hallie Burnett. It originally went for thirty-five cents, but pencil marks inside indicate it has made the rounds of used book sales priced at 50 cents, 19 cents, and 9 cents. I got it for a quarter, a pretty good bargain.
The stories are reprinted mostly from Story magazine and were originally published in the forties and fifties, by such fantasy luminaries as Daphne du Maurier, Byron Liggett, etc.
But what I like most about this cover is that despite the amount of time someone put into that ludicrously unique painting, they couldn't bother to spend ten minutes on a cover design that wouldn't require the hyphenation of "creatures" in the tagline.
Pray for me - I'm going into the playroom closet to find the even tinier collection of ancient pulp pornography. That stuff is the Hello Kitty of my book collections.
I LOVE the cover art on that one. I was not aware that Daphne du Maurier wrote fantasy.
ReplyDeleteThat is the most awesome--and mind-boggling--thing I've ever seen. I've got some pulp covers coming up on Judge a Book by its Cover, but yours beats mine to pieces. Rock.
ReplyDeleteWell I guess you'd have to call Daphne du Maurier a horror/romance writer, but she did write "The Birds" ...
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