The 47th Precinct

I confess to being one of those little girls that snuck nancy drews into bed, in order to read (until the end of the chapter, of course!) under the covers with a flashlight long after my bedtime. My obsession with mysteries has stuck: Ms. Marple, Adam Dalgleish, the 87th precinct, Hitchcock’s Stories Not for the Nervous, and now Kurt Wallandar take up a fair amount of real estate on our bookshelves. I also am entirely hooked on all things pulp: the covers, the mystery magazines, the ridiculous and amazing titles.

Hence, I am thrilled to find the BookScans Database, scanned images of vintage paperbacks, as well as a PLETHORA of all other things pulp. Magazines, Digests, Posters, oddities, trivia — it is all here. In particular, I was thrilled to find that the site includes both the cover AND the back cover of some books (sometimes the layouts and text treatments are really interesting, with these touches that are so quintessentially pulp and entirely defining of a graphic lexicon).

The oddities section of the site includes also dust jackets (an early marketing device, or a chance for the publisher to change information on the book already printed and wrapped with a cover, or just a way to make the paperback look a bit fancier), examples of version changes, and wrap-around covers! There is also a sexy area, with collectable pin-up digest covers, and a sleaze zone (featuring works that approach the line of sensationalism, as the site author explains). Try not to spend hours here…

final note: is “Trouble is my middle name” a lift from Chandler?

This entry was posted Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Americana, Art, Books, Graphics, Inspiration, magazines. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.