Original Art from the Grand Age of American Illustration
Publishers of depression-era pulp magazines, post war men’s adventure and girlie magazines, and lurid paperback titles all used risqué, action-packed illustrations to make their offerings jump off the newsstands in the highly competitive market for readers attention. Cover art pushed the boundaries of what was allowable in a heavily-censored era, coming up with increasingly deviant and outlandish portrayals of sex, violence, and perilous escapes from danger. Today, these works—which provide an intriguing peek into the shadow side of 20th century American culture—are studied by historians and coveted by collectors.
Large and stark, this gouache on board artwork by an obscure pulp & science fiction illustrator using the name Ross appeared as the cover the the May 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction illustrating a story titled "The Man Who Could Not Stop." The story tells the tale of a […]
Artist: Ross
Price: $3,500.00
A ghastly and macabre pulp cover painting by Mel Hunter for the January, 1958 edition of Mercury Mystery Book-Magazine, this loosely illustrated a story by Floyd Mahannah titled The Broken Angel. A voluptuous redheaded vixen appears in a moodily conceived graveyard at night with an ominous figure in a top-hat looming near an […]
Artist: Mel Hunter
Price: $3,950.00
A lurid and outright creepy cover painting by Nicholas Solovioff for the August, 1955 edition of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, loosely illustrated the interior story Bride In Danger. A beautiful corpse, a once blushing bride on her honeymoon, is now found alone on a desolate beach, bloodied and left in the open […]
Artist: Nicholas Solovioff
Price: $3,500.00
This fabulous other-wordly cover painting by the important American genre artist Paul Lehr was created for the July,1972 issue of Occult Magazine.
Artist: Paul Lehr
Price: $1,995.00
In this gouache-on-board cover illustration for 1952's The Scarlet Slipper, James Meese captures the unique mixture of the American homestead with a tough-talking private eye in the mix.
Artist: James Alfred Meese
Price: $3,850.00
This was the original camera ready artwork used in the production of the 1970 Avon paperback edition of the novel The Favorite Game by Leonard Cohen.
Artist: Milton Charles
Price: $850.00
This gouache illustration painting appeared on the cover of Naked Sinner, the 1959 "savage novel of a wild call girl and her shocking immoral affairs".
Artist: American Artist
Price: $4,800.00
A subversive youth gone wild party scene original cover painting by Peter Driben likely used for a paperback book title published by the Novel Library imprint. During the 1950s a hedonistic bohemian fictional sub-culture existed where teens smoked reefer and engaged in orgiastic exploits while becoming addicted to heroin. In showing these delinquents pursuing their darkest sinful desires, the illustrators of the day seemed to take great joy and this is a prime example of this sort of homage to debauchery.
Artist: Peter Driben
Price: $4,500.00
This dramatic, futuristic sci-fi interior pulp illustration was created by Harold McCauley for an as-of-yet unidentified Ziff-Davis title.
Artist: Harold McCauley
Price: $2,950.00
Death Makes a Mistake is an eerie, dark, and foreboding interior pulp illustration by Harold McCauley which appeared in the January 1943 issue of the sci-fi/fantasy pulp magazine Amazing Stories accompanying the P.F. Costello story of the same title. The caption beneath reads "Reggie looked at the second rose, and then he knew...!" Nicely matted and framed under glass, this […]
Artist: Harold McCauley
Price: $2,350.00
Harold McCauley created this tense, action-packed, gritty, and dramatic illustration for an-as-of-yet unidentified pulp title, circa 1940s.
Artist: Harold McCauley
Price: $1,650.00
Pulp and paperback artist Edward Mortiz created this femme fatale artwork as the cover of the 1961 Beacon Books title House Party by Dominique Napier.
Artist: Edward Moritz
Price: $4,500.00
