Surfing Alien

Sleaze has had collectors come into the market lately and it seems to have unleashed a flood of high grade "rare" books into the market over the last couple of months, unlike anything I've ever seen. There seems to be a lot of old holders willing to let go of their books, including many letting multiple copies of books go. On the other hand, the supply of the traditional classic big keys in high grade has been almost nil over the past two or three years with almost no one seeming willing to let go of their nice big books. Just my anectodal observation

Steve is off on this one imho. Uppwall never painted a known cover in this style, RD is correct, he was much more detailed, while virtually every Dodd cover was in this style.

Love the covers on "Daughter" and "Mask" They're really tough in high grade too.

It's funny how the stars align sometime in collecting rare things. Books you never see in years appear in a matter of weeks and then go down the rabbit hole not to be seen for years again. Well I didn't let the opportunity slip away this time and grabbed this copy of Navy Romances No.3 as soon as I saw it. It's the only copy I've ever seen for sale. I'm going on vacation for the next week so figured I'd post this now before we fly away. Another snazzy Warren King cover and it looks like he did all the interior illos for this one as well. They're a bit better than some of the other issues. Here's the full set. I know a lot of serious collectors looking for these and it's the only full set I'm aware of. I've seen several copies of Army 2 & 3 over the years but Army 1 and the Navys are well hidden if they're out there.

Johnson actually did the second pb edition (Popular Library Eagle EB11) of "Macamba" - in an even more wildly animated fashion, and similar gams to "Infamy", with two back cover paintings. I don't have a high res scan but you get the drift...

For posterity @jimjum12 Since Dan has sold out Illustration No. 77, I'll post an image of the Raymond Johnson checklist for your reference. This is only the paperbacks and digests and there are a few additions to it since publication, but this is certainly the bulk of his pb covers as agreed to by a panel of three collectors with pretty tough criteria for attribution. There's several dozen that one or two of us were quite sure about, but we only put covers that all three of us agreed were Johnson (or were signed or credited) on the list. There's also dozens of foreign re-uses, we've listed a couple but we've all seen quite a few more, but beyond the scope of what we were trying to accomplish, which was US pbs, within Dan's deadline. I saved it as high a res jpg as my pdf editor would allow. It's still a bit blurry so if you want a sharp pdf, you can pm me your email and I'll send a copy.

Raymond Johnson

Run While You Can by William Woolfolk Popular Library 790 1956 Raymond Johnson cover art.

You're on fire lately with the Arkham's Eric

A few pages of "Steranko" l

Aww, we're all in this together Jimbo, you know all our opinions are like TP targets in the end I've felt like opining on this topic (I agree there's waaay too many "classics" being daubed around) but mostly to the extent that only the long time pulp collectors have any grasp on what the small pulp community considered classic for many years. I'd take the opinion of Tim, or Doug Ellis over any comic guys. I'm a Marvel comic kid who grew up in the 70's comic scene so all the pulps I considered "classic" were the ones Steranko pictured in his "Bloody Pulps" section of his "History of Comics" Many of those are classic, but the point is there were very few places (Steranko being one of them) that comic fans even casually got infected by great pulp art to be exposed enough to be privy to what the long standing pulp circle of collectors considered collectively.

"Come and Be Killed" by Dorothy Bennett. Best Detective Novel No. 1 1942. Cover art by Cardwell Higgins. One of the coolest covers of the pre-Atlas Marvel digests. Thanks to @Hap Hazard for letting this one go. It's a bit of a demon to find in any kind of decent shape. The title page takes that Devil colophon up a notch to great effect

Oil, applied in many layers of thickness from a wisp to globs. He definitely was experimenting a lot on this early painting. Likely because of such a wide angle city/sea scape view, maybe the earliest I've seen like this of his. So many of his paintings are relatively close up, this has a sketchy, impressionistic feel. I'm sure getting a Ballantine cover in 1952 was a big deal for him.

I like this one. It has the minimum required perspective field to keep my attention and look like a picture. Actually like a nice b/w interior turned into a cover

The standard Bainbridge Board. They are large though

I like Powers a lot, I love this one, a favorite. Of course, this has the surrealist cohesiveness of the background, which I associate with Dali. My comments of indifference are in reference to his covers that are mostly just squiggly lines or lines and shapes, of which there are plenty, that leave me cold, as much of the Pollack splatter type modern art does. I wouldn't spend anyone's millions on that, but I'd buy the Hell's Pavement OA in a second

Robert Maguire original artwork for "Summer Street" by Hal Ellson, Ballantine No. 27, 1952. It's very early for him, before he started with the large good girls. Still a cool JD piece and both front and back paintings It's in need of a fair amount of restoration and framing, both of which I'm happy to do to preserve his legacy Original art is so rewarding to handle.

"Girl Out Back" is great, and a real nice Chiriaka cover as well. When I posted my undercopy a couple of months ago I was going to sell it but put it back on the shelf. There's some books I just really like to have more than one nice copy of

These are long before the Universal Digests started but are also cheap paper covers. And they are all about the cover art, not the stories, which are short MAM type fantasies. They do have Warren King in common with Uni, as Uni hired King for a bunch of covers in the 1950's. The first issue with the Schomburg war cover is exceedingly rare, much rarer than his comic covers. The four other issues are all scarce to rare and all have King covers with leggy good girls. I think they were meant to be breezy stories for the troops as the horror of the war wore down in late '45, early 46

Fun catching up on this thread, I've posted very little lately as work has been consuming this week. Still had a little time for some fun. I acquired this little gem from @Hap Hazard and wanted to mention he's great to deal with Navy Romances No. 1, Spring 1946, Cover by Warren King This is a tough little pamphlet and goes great with my full set of Army Romances. I just need Navy Romances No. 3 now to complete the entire "Romances" series (there is no known #2)

You are correct, and they are not. Words have meaning but they get butchered so easily, especially in interwebs, cut-n-paste world . This is the first PBO novel under the GM label. I love this Downes cover, along with his other early Gold Medal covers. I love the ones Pat posted earlier as well but the tall format and the publisher's willingness to let the artists paint big uncluttered pin-up girls really lit up the pb racks. Who could resist? The excellent original stories kept them coming back for more and all the other publishers had to start soliciting originals.

I love this series, some excellent covers. I haven't had any problem selling dupes. I don't think they're as out of favor as you think

Basically this. Almost all the pictorial cover dj's are wrapped on later printings, or remainder books, with duller covers released earlier in the 40's before the GGA boom started around 1948. Once that back stock was gone they just went right to the main cover with the goodies.

Rafael DeSoto