Thursday, July 26, 2012

Pulp Fiction II: Bad Girls Club

Apparently, sometimes the titles of the books themselves were deemed insufficiently titillating, and had to be changed:


But it's interesting, isn't it, that it's the female character that gets recast as the bad one. So what if that's thoroughly inaccurate and completely unfair? The point is to sell books, right?


Oh, well. At least they spelled Kay's name correctly...

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Pulp Fiction; Or, You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover

Like the work of many a greater and lesser writer, Kay's novels were republished through the 1940s and 50s in cheap (in both commonly understood senses of the word) paperback editions, tarted up with racy new covers that gave a thoroughly inaccurate and misleading (and certainly intentional) impression of the work therein. 



While the clothes and hairstyles have been brought up-to-date for this 1949 reissue of Young Man, you'd never know that this is actually a Jazz Age story about newspaper reporters, Prohibition, and bootleg whisky!