Surfing Alien

Bad Girls, Bad Girls, what ya gonna do?

I think she means business. Too risky to find out for sure. She appeared on the cover of the paperback "Don't Ever Love Me." by Octavus Roy Cohen. It was also used on a cover of an issue of Mystery Book Magazine.

I posted a link a few pages back to a thread with loads of swipes between the paperbacks and comics but the link is busted now. As to Belarski specifically, i've seen a bunch of Popular Library covers that started as pulp covers. I wouldn't know if he owned the rights and it was him re-working them or the publisher re-using and re-touching them.

Twofer dangerous Maguire dames. The Dewey title is pretty spectacular for a white book, the pages are snowy as well. I want to read it but i'll have to find a beater.

These guys could paint! I love the floorboards at Ruby's Place... you could hear them creak... they're seedy perfect... They had so much more canvas to work with on the digests.

This working from home thing is giving me waaaay too much time to hunt the interwebs for paperbacks, but i've actually dug out a few great bargains. I've never owned a copy of Deadly Streets although it has always been on my want list. I've thrown dozens of thrill bids but nice copies have always been bid up too much but I threw a thrill bid at this and for once no one who cares must've seen it so I got it for a relative song. It's a centerpiece of any JD collection. (P.S. you did not overpay for that Doll's Trunk... very tough that nice)

I love 'em but it's not all about them. I love the moody art covers like the Marchetti, Binger and Meese on those McBain books. Here's a couple sweet digests that came in today that are GGA but in the more moody style... Rudolph Belarski George Gross and Paul Kresse

Nice - great choices. I love the grade point you're going for as well

Quote worthy copy of a great classic bondage cover. I've got some mail call notifications in my email so hopefully i'll be posting a bit later

So I had to actually go and watch that video. While I would not do or recommend any of the color touch techniques they applied (To an LA Bantam Shadow Picture cover no less ) The vaseline might not be a terrible idea, if they are saying it is effective in removing the residue of lost lamination, AND it would leave no odor. From Westy's post I thought they were suggesting the vaseline sheen would replace the sheen of the missing laminate. Missing laminate often leaves a dull residue from the long-dried lamination glue and can look bad enough that I could see trying to clean it off. The microwave "trick" to soften glue to correct spine lean is interesting - but I keep seeing visions of a Gremlin exploding in the microwave lol.

This is so absurd, it's laughable I've encountered all sorts of funky amateur resto attempts on paperbacks - mostly the usual suspects like marker hits on color losses and tape and bad re-glue jobs.

This... it was amateur each time for me. I suspect that, like buying comics in the 70's before the stigma of restoration arose, collectors thought little of hitting a white crease with a marker to make it look better in a bag.

Love seeing so many cool books. Picked up another L.B. Cole cover, I think this is his best GGA of the Croydon series.

I've already found mixed results with disclosure re: color touch and in those couple of cases I had to make a decision about whether to make a stink about it based on what I paid and whether I could get an unmarked copy on similar terms. It really is like the pre-grading company days in comics and it seems like quite a few pulps have color touch and it's not always disclosed. I don't mind making decisions off what I can see, like ragged (or even trimmed) edges and tape, but color touch, even amateur, can be hard to spot on an internet picture.

Mail call. Been keeping a lookout for this Charles Williams Maguire cover since Randall Dowling posted his. It's a filler for now but the price was right and picked up a filler of another nice Maguire cover with it 👍

Mail call... @Randall Dowling got me looking all over for unsung Maguires again I don't think I had seen this tailight cover before. He was definitely the master of the full length pose.

I haven't pressed a paperback or digest but I'm sure it could probably be done to non color breaking creases like with comic books. Not sure the heavily glued spines could take the heat of pressing without melting though. 99.9% of paperbacks probably not worth it monetarily anyway. I have tried to lightly clean a few covers with the standard dry eraser method - the wonder bread treatment would probably work as well. As always with dry erasers, you have to go very lightly or you'll take the sheen off, then the color under it. It really only can work for light, superficial dirt. For the most part, it's not worth it.

Not bad taste

Here's another JD related title you never see a crisp copy of...

All 3 criteria are actually within your own current knowledge. You know what your financial reach is, You know how to check if there are a lot of copies on the web. It really comes down to what you consider iconic or just fall in love with. There are so many iconic covers, way beyond the most cited ones. I still come across covers that i've never seen before that speak to me and I have to have them. I post a lot of finds here so you have a sense of what I look for (a little bit of everything it turns out ) Pat's method is great because if you love an author or a story, you never regret a purchase. I'm always looking to upgrade my Heinlein's, even though they are relatively inexpensive, they're still tough to find really crisp. Lion & Graphic are both cool titles with lots of keep-worthy covers. The Graphics are much cheaper in general but there's still plenty that are very hard to find in top shape. Lion's run all the way to near the top of the hobby price point with the Thompson books in there but there are many lesser titles that are worthy of love. If you're picky about condition, that narrows the field down because you can find a beat up copy of most paperbacks but finding a crisp one might be a real challenge. Things i'm paying up for, for my personal collection, is mostly digests. I'm on record plenty on this page that I think they're the best bet as far as scarcity in top condition + I like the larger format art. But move along, there's nothing to see here (seriously people...please don't start collecting digests!) Crisp copies of Falcon Digests, for instance are tough as nails and I'd love to get them all eventually, but they might not be your cup of tea.

I think you're being a little humble here - it sure seems like you know what's good

Robert Gibson Jones. He did many of the Fantastic Adventure covers in this time.

Just unboxed this 212 page fattie with a classic cover. If this was a comic book I probably couldn't afford it.

Great stuff! You get a flavor from these and other 30's pulps, especially the aviation ones, of life where world war was on the horizon, even though it was not yet on our shores. I remember my father telling me about life in that decade and the sense of foreboding in the air.

Maguire time again ... These show how broadly Maguire could achieve excellence