Cheap paperback books are like sex: They claim attention, elicit memories good and bad, and get talked about endlessly. The mid-20th century was the era of pulp, which landed in America in 1939.
You could pick up these paper-bound books at the corner drugstore or bus station for a quarter. They had juicy covers featuring original (and sometimes provocative) art, blurring the lines between canonical literature (Emily Brontë and Honoré de Balzac) and the low genres of crime, romance, and Westerns. Even fairly tame cover images grabbed attention. The Unexpected!, Bennett Cerf's 1948 collection of "high tension stories" for Bantam Books, featured a cover by artist Ed Grant of a woman and a man — both in proper suits, though hers is flaming red — standing horrified in front of an open trapdoor. It hints at the thrills within.
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