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Post by Craig Herbertson on Mar 2, 2011 20:02:55 GMT
You've spotted the book lurking in that flea market stall and picked it up. You know you're going to buy it anyway but you fall instantly prey to the collectors disease. You just have to turn it over and look at the back cover. Here's my starter. It's actually an SF collection but there are at least two distinctively horrific stories in Shards of Space by Sheckley. The Slow Season, which provided the inspiration for this back cover, tells of Slobold, a tailor whose business isn't doing too well. A customer comes in and orders a rather strange garment. He's obviously got the wrong tailor but Slobold takes the job with unhappy results.
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Post by dem bones on Mar 2, 2011 22:13:55 GMT
Nice idea for a thread, craig! hope this brilliant backsides selection helps things along. I know, i know. The photo of the glamorous trio giving it their all for Rod Serling's Triple W is the same front and back, but it's so adorable you can hardly complain. The psychedelic blackmail note is from the Panther edition of Horror Omnibus, one of Kurt Singer's better offerings. Somehow, the Tales From The Crypt flip makes it even without the essential participation of Joan Collins in the seminal And All Around The House sequence. Victor Samuel's novel might be one of the all-time great pointless Dracula rip offs, but that proved no obstacle to Popular Library's blurbhack who wisely dumped it after the first page, wrote about a The Vampire Women that existed entirely in his own mind. Sphere give the hard sell to the lavish feast of rib-tickling hilarity that is What Rugby Jokes Did Next. I love the way Ballantine, and later NEL, made good use of every opportunity to advertise their wares. Zacherley's Midnight Snack also scores with a neat snap of the creepy horror host in action.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Mar 3, 2011 7:05:41 GMT
The beauty of the back cover is twofold I think. On the one hand there will be a few rare gems of illustration or graphics, on the other hand you have the grotesque blurbs. Another SF with a horrific slant: '6 and the Silent Scream', Belmont 1960- Editor Ivan Howard; stories by Dick, Sheckley, Jourdan, D.A. Banks and Frank Belknap Long - where the front and back are the same picture but the back is better for less colour. The front wins marginally on the grotesque blurb angle by stating: 'The infiltration of Horror will bring chills to your very Marrow'
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Post by dem bones on Mar 3, 2011 12:30:54 GMT
For sheer panache .... The Panther art department had it sussed with this effort for John Garforth's The Avengers #1: The Floating Game. The Heil Harris! blurb is worth checking out too, as, for once, are both novels. The Case Against Satan is one of my all-time favourite wraparound jobs, simple as that. Meanwhile, Groff Conklin's Twisted matches a detail from the cover illustration with the usual "these stories are too terrifying to exist!"-style patter and everybody's happy. Not the best of the Badgers i could've used, but a fine example of the informative 'about the authors' blurb: "Lee Barton - author of the epoch-making horror novel The Unseen - has produced a nerve-chilling fantasy in The Return of Albertus. R. Lionel Fanthorpe, whose work ranks with that of Poe, Blackwood and Lovecraft ...." The cover stills - front and back - are surely the only reason for buying NEL's Histoires Extraordinaires tie-in.
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Post by jamesdoig on Mar 5, 2011 22:39:11 GMT
;DIt must be unusual to find really good back covers - after all it, it's the front that was meant to attract the passing news stall banana. Look at these uniform Avon back covers: Turn them around and hey presto... I probably look at these and read them more often then the expensive first editions I've got. This back cover of the NEL Dr Caligari's Black Book isn't too bad. And I guess the wrap around art of the Ballantine fantasy series is great.
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Post by dem bones on Mar 6, 2011 13:57:37 GMT
Thanks to Bruce Pennington's gorgeous painting i'd say the flip of Dr. Caligari's Black Book is way more attractive/ customer enticing than most front covers. Another bonus, Haining's revised selection for the paperback is arguably an improvement on the original W. H. Allen hardback, though its a shame he dropped the Wakefield story.
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Post by andydecker on Mar 6, 2011 16:45:43 GMT
I never realised how rare a good back-cover is. I couldn´t find one which would merit a scan.
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Post by dem bones on Mar 7, 2011 9:30:31 GMT
I'll bet once you've found one among your collection, you'll find loads, Andy. How about the Sexton Blake's? Here's a splendid example of the classic superb-blurb/ gorgeous-gal-running-away combo for W. Howard Baker's The Fugitive (Mayflower, 1965) Generous to a fault, Mayflower were also responsible for the justly celebrated (on Vault, at least) dead-girl-in-a-basket cover for Baker's Treason Remembered. Easy to forget that the reverse, a ghoulish Paparazzi shot of murdered pop star Larry Bacardi, is none too shabby either.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Mar 22, 2011 11:04:33 GMT
Difficult to beat this back cover on any count. Hawk the Slayer, Nel 1980. Is that John Terry holding a sword, his face a mix of conflicting emotions? - 'I'm in a film with Jack Palance but they made me wear these doe skin boots?'
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Post by cw67q on Mar 23, 2011 8:44:26 GMT
Hawk the Slayer was the first film I saw on our first video player. Our living room was full of relatives, cousins and aunties, and the neighbours from the other two houses in our block. I reckon there must have been 8 or 9 adults and 12-15 kids sitting on every possible item of furniture or gathered together on the floor around bowls of crisps or sweets. I think I would have been about 14 or 15, I was the oldest of the kids anyway. Great film, I still have a soft spot for it today, partly down to the associations admittedly. - Chris Difficult to beat this back cover on any count. Hawk the Slayer, Nel 1980. Is that John Terry holding a sword, his face a mix of conflicting emotions? - 'I'm in a film with Jack Palance but they made me wear these doe skin boots?'
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Post by dem bones on Mar 23, 2011 17:54:26 GMT
Charlotte Jay - The Yellow Turban (Fontana, 1962) this one is pretty neat. i've noticed that often any back cover illustration will be a detail from the one up front, but in this instance you get a delightfully ghastly original.
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sara
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 69
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Post by sara on Apr 23, 2011 10:02:32 GMT
Shame Teasers by Bud Arkman. These days I find it hard to resist any vintage paperback I might stumble across in charity shops, regardless of genre but the front cover to this is hideous! Absolutely not my cup of tea at all. However on turning it over to the back.... Well, I must confess to having a bit of a soft spot for these ‘good boy gone bad’ storylines and in any event who could say no to a young man roaming the lust highway in his tormented sin trap? Tucked between lines like “Tony caused a volcano to erupt and passionately she showed him how lava can be both hot and beautiful” is a rather fun little tale about a young writer who sells his first script and celebrates by shagging the office secretary, as well as a starlet he picks up at a bar on his way home. When he does finally make it back to his wife he is, rather hypocritically I think, dismayed to find her in bed with another man. So he punches the guy’s lights out and runs off when his wife threatens to call the police, terrified he might have killed him. Needing to keep a low profile, Tony takes a job on a fishing boat then gets picked up by an older woman with an offer too good to refuse. Shacked up in a cottage at the bottom of her garden, Tony starts writing his next bestseller but gets distracted when her husband decides to pay him a visit. And that’s when Tony’s adventure really begins.... And in case you’re curious, here’s what it looks like from the front -
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Post by jamesdoig on Apr 23, 2011 10:28:06 GMT
That's magnificent, in every way.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Apr 23, 2011 15:53:59 GMT
That's magnificent, in every way. Yes it is.
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Post by noose on Apr 24, 2011 19:09:50 GMT
Bill Naughton's ALFIE, as published by Panther...
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