Paperback publishers get it up in Paris.
Below, seven more examples of vintage paperbacks using the Eiffel Tower on their covers. You can add these to the collection of twenty-two we put together a few years back.
FranceParisDigit BooksBernard NewmanMichel AtkinsonJulian PaulBarrowLouis-Charles RoyerJoseph HeronFrancoise DorysGeorge GoodmanRichard SpongPeter Cheyneycover artcover collectionliterature
Fancy meeting an Aryan like you in a place like this.
We've talked about French author Louis-Charles Royer and mentioned the staying power of his novels, which enjoyed many English language reprints throughout the 1950s. Love Camp is Royer doing what he does best, which is exploring sexual niches and conjuring up romance in far flung locales. The story is as the art depicts—women are chosen for the honor of attempting to mate with Nazi soldiers in order to breed a master race. The program was known as Lebensborn, or Fount of Life, and was under control of the SS. The book interweaves the lives of characters brought to a lakeside monastery for some state sponsored bonin'. Some of them fall in love, others struggle with shame, one fights to preserve a female friend's virginity, and so forth, while the doctor who runs the show manages to knock up an eager young recruit only to later reject her and blame her pregnancy on another soldier. It's all exactly as titillating as it sounds, with women paraded naked before men, a lesbian matron having her way with rejected recruits, nude exercise sessions, and other indulgences, all under the dark Nazi aegis. There were many naziploitation books written during the mid-century period, and while it's probably a good thing the trend died, it really did lend itself quite well to exploring perversion and evil. But considering the Nazis' real world toll, such lightweight books can only minimize the horror. The Pyramid paperback you see here is from 1953 with art by Julian Paul.
GermanyWorld War IIPyramid BooksLouis-Charles Royercover artliteraturenazis
Vintage Pulp Aug 24 2015
A new woman for a new era.
This issue of Paris Magazine features a beautiful Louis-Charles Royer cover of Ziegfeld star Claire Luce, one of the most popular celebrities of her time. Her heyday was the 1920s and '30s, a period during which—though this is little remarked upon today—substantially more women began to have sex before marriage. By the time the first surveys took place in the 1940s about 50% of women admitted to having pre-marital sex. Anecdotally, during the 1920s probably at least one in four women had sex as singles. Claire Luce was a pioneer of the female right to choose. A mere eight-year span of her diary describes sixty lovers.
Luce very much personifies a seismic shift in the values of Western women. Many scholars say it happened because they moved into the university and the workplace around that time, and that was indeed an important factor because it brought women and men into mutual contact outside of family and church situations. But it's clear the prime mover was the trauma of World War I and the loss of 37 million lives in a conflict that taught those who came of age around then that life could be short and joy could be fleeting. This factor is nearly always downplayed in studies of that time, though we have never understood why. It is too obvious?
Even with their numbers increasing, relatively few women were in the university and workplace. But virtually no Western family went untouched by the war. Those 37 million deaths reached deep into every town, every enclave, every social class. Nearly everyone had lost a father, a brother, an uncle, or at least a family friend. And if a loved one actually survived battle, they often returned to preach the futility of war to the generation below them—or by their mere broken presence serve as a warning. Ernest Hemingway captured this in The Sun Also Rises, which focuses on Jake, prevented by a war wound from having sex, and Lady Brett, who loves Jake but must constantly seek lovers elsewhere.
Of course, there are many factors behind any social shift, but rapid change typically derives from chaos. Ask any neo-con or disaster capitalist. The primary effect of war or warlike events upon society is to alter how it views life, death, and personal freedom. In the past, the spectre of death made people want more freedom to live as they saw fit; in our present era, traumatic events have resulted in people agreeing to sacrifice their personal freedom (thanks to powerful suggestions and hard work by opportunistic governments).
Anyway, just an interesting digression concerning Paris Magazine's cover star. Like predecessors such as Dorothy Parker, and peers like Tallulah Bankhead, she was a sexual trendsetter, a new type of woman for a radically reordered Western world. She's also about as pulp as it gets. We may get back to Claire Luce a bit later, but in the meantime we have a bunch of interior scans from Paris Magazine below, and more issues available at the click of a mouse. This edition, number 34, appeared in 1934.
FranceWorld War IParisParis MagazineZiegfeld FolliesClaire LuceAnne DoloresLouis-Charles RoyerErnest Hemingwayliteraturemagazine art
Vintage Pulp Apr 11 2013
The lady of the harem is in.
Above is a pretty cover for Louis-Charles Royer's 1931 romance Le Sérail, aka The Harem. You may remember a reader sent in a front for this a year ago. This alternate version, which we stumbled across just yesterday, appeared in 1954, and the cover art is by the brilliant French painter and portraitist Jean-Gabriel Domergue. His work was used for several Royer covers, and though they aren't pulp influenced, they're so good we decided to share a few below.
FranceLes Editions de ParisLe SérailThe HaremLes ensorceléesL'amour à HonoluluHaras humainLa La Maîtresse noireLouis-Charles RoyerJean-Gabriel Domerguecover artliterature
It seems, cherie, zat you have ze heart murmur. And what does it murmur? Ooh la la.
That old rascal Louis-Charles Royer is at it again, this time with French Doctor, which appeared as a Pyramid paperback in 1951 and was popular enough to be reprinted multiple times. Originally published in 1942 as Le désir, it's the story of a French doctor and the internal medicine he provides to three women named Magoune, Elise, and of course, Kitty, because no French sleaze novel would be complete without a Kitty. Royer wrote beginning in the 1920s, and his work proved enduringly popular, with both new novels and English translations of his old books appearing throughout the '40s, '50s and '60s. It's interesting that as widely read as he was, there's virtually no info on him. There isn't even a web page—French or English—listing his full bibliography. Maybe we'll step up to the plate on that one later. The cover of French Doctor was painted by Hunter Barker, as was the one immediately below. We also found a third American version. And finally, in panel four we thought we'd show you the French paperback, with art by the genius painter Emile Baes.
Update: there is now, a couple of years after we originally wrote the above, a French Wikipedia page, which you can access here.
Pyramid BooksHunter BarkerLouis-Charles RoyerEmile Baescover artliterature
Reader Pulp Apr 16 2012
Early '50s paperbacks—when "French" was the byword for erotic.
A delightfully decaying cover from what remains of my collection.
submitted by scorzonera
Even our girlfriends liked this one. Thanks a million, sir. We gather that this was written by French author Louis-Charles Royer in 1931, near the beginning of his prolific career.
FranceThe HaremLe SérailLouis-Charles Royercover art