Pulp Covers

     About 8 years ago my friend Serafina gave me a thank you card for helping her out on a project. The card was actually a post card of a vintage pulp cover. I thought it was funny and ridiculous. It was around this time I had gotten involved in studio photography and thought it would be fun to recreate this pulp cover.

Dime a Dance Queen

     Pulp fiction had its heyday in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. Genres ranged from westerns to science fiction to hard-boiled detective and everything in-between. Today it’s the illustrated covers of these novels that are popular and kitschy. These trashy dime a dozen novels (some writers were paid per word) weren’t the only novels to have these illustrated pulp covers. After a novel went through it’s hard cover printing, a soft cover printing would follow, and sometimes it would be with a different publisher. This new publisher would commission a new cover that would help sell these books at drug stores and news stands across the USA. So you could have a tawdry pulp novel like Divorce Bait next to a famed work of fiction like Catcher in the Rye. Actually J.D. Salinger was quite furious with that illustration that donned his novel so when it came time for the the next printing he took control. The new cover was just maroon with yellow lettering which I'm sure you’ll probably be familiar with from your high-school days. But regardless of whether it was a trashy novel or a great work of art, the covers tried to be a sensationalist as possible. Here’s a good article in New Yorker Magazine about the pulp business.

The illustrated cover of Catcher in the Rye which Salinger despised on the left.
His choice for the next cover on the right.

      I was interested in the covers that had more of a pin-up quality to them. These covers had some of the more ridiculous titles and usually were about woman who were in trouble because of their deviousness. They were dangerous because they were sexual active. They weren’t woman who were chaste and faithful. They were out of control Femme Fatales. I’m sure there were many people who were up in arms about this type of “smut” that was peddled at book stores back then. For my first pulp cover I had asked the wonderful Polly Wood if she’d like to help me recreate it. She agreed, for my first 3 covers actually.

My first pulp cover recreation with Polly Wood 

Recreation from the post card my friend gave me. Polly Wood as
The Dance Queen and me as the sleazy guy 

      Once the pictures were taken it was time to make the cover. I usually made up a new author name for the book. Sometimes I would use the same copy as on the original cover or I would make it up. I manipulated the photo somewhat to make it look a little more like an illustration. One of my favorite covers was Sin on Wheels that my friend Annalee suggested I recreate. I then suggested that she should be the one to pose for it.

Annalee Peck 

     First I had to find a camper. My original plan was to ask some people who lived out of their campers by the local Fred Meyer store. But then friend Kindra Meyer said I could use the camper at her job, Wexley School for Girls, an advertising agency. I believe they held pitch meetings inside the camper. Fuchsia FoXXX did a great job with hair and make-up and this eventually became one of my most popular covers. People started to come to me with covers they wanted to see themselves in. Cherry Manhattan wanted to be a Plaything of Passion. It’s a fun and challenging process trying to bring all the elements together to faithfully recreate a silly and sexy pulp cover. At some point I thought it would be fun to make up my own covers.

Cherry Manhattan 

     My first instinct for creating my own cover was to outdo original pulp covers in both their sexual content and taboos as seen from the mid-century era. Bitsy Rini helped me with one of my first original cover, Pool Hall Tart, which we shot at The Comet Tavern. For the next original cover I wanted to do something different. The result was Shore Leave, with The Luminous Pariah and Paris Original. There were plenty of pulp novels that dealt with homosexuality during pulps heyday but there were restrictions on what could be written.  In 2011, local producers Cherry Manhattan, Diva le Deviant & Lyla la Coeur brought the play The Beebo Brinker Chronicles to Seattle. After one of the productions, original author of the Beebo Brinker series, Ann Bannon, gave a talk on Beebo and what it was like to write about that subject of homosexuality back in the late 50’s. Basically homosexuality could not be written in a positive light and that in the end the characters would either have to commit suicide or go insane. Luckily around this time these censorship rules fell by the wayside as the result of first amendment rights.

Bitsy Rini 

Paris Orginal & the Luminous Pariah 

The producers of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles 

     The pulp covers of decades past are now definitely part of the Americana land scape. They're fun, kitschy, silly and sometimes absurd. One of my passions is to continue to recreate them. If you have a fabulous pulp cover that you'd like to recreate or have an idea of your own, I can help with that. Check out pocphotocompany.com for more info. Also check my gallery to see some other of my pulp cover recreations.
   

All Pulp Cover Creations © Paul O'Connell