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

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 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...

Episode 10 - Daphne Du Maurier & My Cousin Rachel

Daphne Du Maurier is best known for the film adaptations of her novels. Her bestselling novel Rebecca was made into a very popular Alfred Hitchcock film starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontane. The novel itself has never been out of print, but most people remember the movie and not the original novel which is much, much different than the film. Daphne has been unfairly (and inaccurately) labeled a "woman's author" and a writer of "gothic romances". Nothing could be further from the truth. She was an unsentimental author who wrote of the power struggles between men and women, especially in marriage. She had an uncanny ability to create suspense and mood along with a gift for storytelling. If anything her novels are anti-romances as the woman doesn't get her man and there are no happy endings to her novels. In this episode of the Paperback Show, we look at Daphne Du Maurier's life and writings paying attention to the paperback versions of her works. ...

The Paperback Show Podcast

Search This Blog