Paperback 747: The Strange Brigade / John Jennings (Cardinal C-137)

Paperback 747: Cardinal C-137 (1st ptg, 1954)

Title: The Strange Brigade
Author: John Jennings
Cover artist: Rudy Nappi

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• If 'love' wasn't just a word, what else was it??! A deed? Are you talking about sex? You are, aren't you. 
• Speaking of sex, this book is at least in part about trappers, i.e. beaver.
• "Hey … hey baby … hey … I like your ears …" Ugh, I can practically feel his grog breath on my shoulder.
• Steve did not take well to losing the "Who Wore It Best?" competition to Lionel. Even the awkward consolations of a concerned squaw could not alleviate Steve's fist-clenching fury.

Best things about this back cover:

• Mmm, I love bois brûlés. My favorite dessert. Always puts me in the mood for bone-cracking / love-making.
• I do love a woman who acts "quite otherwise." 
• "Sinister half-breed"—I would think that in vintage paperback-speak, that would be redundant.

Page 123~

Here were abundant varieties of smaller game: hares and rabbits, chattering squirrels, the white partridge, and spruce grouse, foxes, beaver, martins, musquash, otter and a dozen others. 

This is a really weird list, not so much for what's on it, but for how it's set up. Why do the squirrels get a behavioral detail? Why is there a "the" with the white partridge? Why do we start a new list with a new "and" just before spruce grouse? Why do you list so many and then say "a dozen others?" Why not keep going? You're half way there, for god's sake. Also, "a dozen"? That's a pretty specific number. Are you sure it wasn't a baker's dozen? 10? This is what happens when you think too much about a random filler sentence in a middling historical novel from 60 years ago.

[Alternative comment: "Musquash Susie / Musquash Sam / Do the jitterbug out in Musquash Land …"]

~RP

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Paperback 187: Cabin Road / John Faulkner (Gold Medal 178)

Paperback 187: Gold Medal 178 (PBO, 1951)
Title: Cabin Road
Author: John Faulkner
Cover artist: Barye Phillips

Yours for: $12


Best things about this cover:

• "If you loved William, then it's within the realm of possibility that you might not hate ... John Faulkner!"
• Erskine Caldwell paperbacks sold by the bushel, and they invariably featured unspeakably hot hillbilly women who had all their teeth. I guess the idea was that the poor were "earthy" (i.e. liked to do it). So there is a kind of post-"Tobacco Road" vogue in backwoods babery that you can see in a number of 1950s paperbacks.
• Can a hillbilly be "ribald?"
• This woman is a mess from the neck up. It's like someone photoshopped her head on wrong. Or broke her neck, waited for rigor mortis to set in, and then propped her up there.

Best things about this back cover:

• Uh, nothing
• Again with the "ribald"
• See, I told you - "Tobacco Road"-ishness was clearly the selling point here
• Steinbeck? *William* Faulkner? OK, now you're pushing it
• "Earthy" "Ribald" "Lusty" ... "female problems"!? Does that mean the same thing it means now? Hey, what does it mean now? Wasn't that the name of a movie starring Divine?

Page 123~

"I don't see nothing to want to stand over there about," George said. "Hit looks like to me the floor's about the same as it is where at you're standing, what of it you can see fer them dogs. Ain't you comfortable there?"

I'm ... going to need a translator.

~RP