Ross Macdonald Paperback Covers

I recently acquired four new Ross MacDonald vintage paperbacks and wanted to share them. Ross MacDonald is one of my favorite American mystery writers. He was the first mystery author to receive a front page review in the New York Times Book Review (Underground Man, reviewed by Eudora Welty) and he was instrumental in taking the mystery genre out of the pulps and into literature. I still think he tops Chandler and Hammett in his writing skills. You will be richly rewarded if you venture into your local used bookstore and pick up one of his Lew Archer novels.

You can find more about Ross MacDonald here

Ep 17- Bantam, Louis L'amour and the Paperback Western

Ian Ballantine was a young graduate student in 1939. He wrote a thesis on the economics of the paperback industry in the late 1930s that brought him to the attention of several paperback publishers. He opened the American branch of Penguin Books (a UK company) in 1939. Ian was primarily responsible for re-selling Penguins in the United States. However, World War 2 cut off his shipments from the UK, so he began to publish paperbacks himself. One change he made was to add illustrated covers to his paperbacks which were primarily sold through magazine distributors and needed an eye-catching cover to compete. But when Penguin founder Anthony Lane visited the U.S. Penguin offices after the war, he was appalled at these new illustrated covers. He demanded that the paperbacks be simply text and be color-coded like the British Penguins. Ian Ballantine refused and left the company. Ian started his own company with his wife Betty Ballantine and secured funding from a major hardback publi...

Paperback Cover of the Week: Beowulf, translated by Burton Raffel

Signet classics (2008). Cover design by HAVOC Media Burton Raffel was a lawyer turned critic and translator. He specialized in poetry and, in addition to writing his own poetry, he translated Mandelstram, Old English poetry, Horace, Cervantes, a Vietnamese poetry collection along with many books on the structure and meaning of poetry. Raffel’s Beowulf was the first version of the poem I read. In my teens and enthralled by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, I sought out anything written by Tolkien. His groundbreaking essay, “Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics”, was a little over my head then, so I sought a translation of the poem to read. Burton Raffel’s was the most common (and still is). I read the poem in a day and started a fascination with the Beowulf story that has lasted my whole life. I’ve probably read a dozen translations/ve...

Ep 18 Patricia Highsmith & The Talented Mr. Ripley

Patricia Highsmith is having a surge of popularity due to the recent TV series “Ripley’ (adapting her novel, “T he Incredible Mr. Ripley”. It is much deserved as her work is unique and unsettling. Most of her major novels (she wrote 22 of them) were written in the 1950s and 1960s and reflect the temper of those times. However, she used her own life, much like a method actor uses memories of their life events, to create characters that are remarkable and troubling. In the podcast, Hal Bodner and I address her troubled life, her views and background as a gay woman and her writing style/themes. We discuss HIghsmith’s masterwork novel, The Incredible Mr. Ripley, a strange crime story told from the point of view of the criminal. Or is he? The short biography was sourced from the excellent bio, “Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith" by Andrew Wilson. Her life was one of sex, alcohol and writing, writing, writing. She also drew, painted, designed and constructed furniture, c...

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