Original Art from the Grand Age of American Illustration
In a classic, provocative, and lurid confrontation, Harry Barton shows a fiery redheaded femme-fatale struggling with Joe Chicago, the square-jawed, prizefighting hero of Ross Laurence’s 1953 mobster crime novel The Fast Buck. First published as a part of the Ace Double Novels series, this is a classic example of danger and drama, with provocative undertones, from the down […]
Artist: Harry Barton
Price: Sold
A sultry mixed medium paperback cover illustration by Lou Marchetti, this first appeared in 1951 as the paperback cover of Shadow Of The Mafia, aka Horns of the Devil by Louis Malley. The provocative and hard-boiled image shows an “easy loving” blonde beauty flirtatiously eying the streetwise tough Don Alberto, who lays on the bed, his enforcers […]
Artist: Lou Marchetti
Price: Sold
This dramatic and lurid oil painting was created by Rudy Nappi as the original cover for the now-infamous Jane Manning novel Reefer Girl, published by Detective House in New York under the Cameo Books imprint in 1953. The cover slug describes the work as “The frank, biting story of a young girl of the slums, and […]
Artist: Rudy Nappi
Price: Sold
Dating to 1950, this dazzling colorful original paperback cover was painted by George Gross for Quarter Books #57, The Virgin And The Barfly. Illustrating a scene from the novel by Gerald Foster (one of many likely pseudonyms of the prolific Peggy Gladdis), this is a splashy, trashy, and altogether irresistible example of sleaze paperback […]
Artist: George Gross
Price: Sold
A lurid and prototypically noir paperback cover painting by the prolific American artist and illustrator Victor Olson, for the 1965 Midwood Book title Down And Out. Written by Les Masters – a well proportioned young housewife gets herself in financial hot water unbeknownst to her husband, she has to sell her valor to this snarky […]
Artist: Victor Olson
Price: Sold
A lustful, original cover painting by Rudy Nappi for the 1959 Tower paperback cover titled A Strange Kind of Love, by Lawrence Block, written under his early pseudonym Sheldon Lord. Billed as a “daring tale of the love life of a writer and his most unusual mistress,” Block has described the story as that of […]
Artist: Rudy Nappi
Price: Sold
A lurid and genre defining erotic paperback book cover for the 1950 Quarter Books Publishing Company title “Illicit Pleasure” written by Peggy Gaddis. The artwork is unsigned with verso information by our colleague Fred Taraba with affirmation that this work was done by Rudy Nappi. This is an inspired subversive image with our cover girl Linda Blaine showing her “body that could make even the most confirmed woman-hater sit up and beg…” enticing an enlisted man to take notice down at the pier.
Artist: Rudy Nappi
Price: S O L D
