Sunday, February 25, 2007
The Case of the Immoral Mapback
Yesterday afternoon I had a rare moment in the life of a homemaker: the house was clean(ish), the errands were run, the pantry was stocked, laundry was going, and Vintage Baby was asleep, as was Mr. Vintage Reader. On top of that, the May issue of EQMM had just come in the mail, so I sat down to read. But of course, I couldn't make it through more than a few stories without coming across something I wanted to look up online.
Ed Gorman's column "Blog Bytes" featured The Rap Sheet, a blog that used to be a newsletter. Since I've been largely away from the blogosphere for the last year and a half, I missed the beginning of this terrific blog, so I have a lot to catch up with. But halfway down the page as of today, there was a really nice post about cover art, specifically mentioning one of my favorite examples, Fools Die on Friday, by A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner). It's one of the Dell Mapbacks, which longtime readers (both of you) know are my collecting passion, and might remember how happy I was to luck into a very good edition with the original cover--the racier one--a few years ago (the permalink to that post isn't working, since the site has been moved from Blogger to WordPress and back since then, and I haven't gotten around to fixing all the little things that went screwy during that process).
That post led me to another neat post at Vorpal Blade Online about collecting Dell Mapbacks. This post has lots of gorgeous cover scans, including the maps on the back covers.
And speaking of cover scans... the post at The Rap Sheet also led me to Bookscans, a HUGE collection of paperback cover art of the 40s and 50s. This project is so inspiring that I've decided that next time I have a free afternoon I will spend it scanning covers to send it the Bookscans guy. Yes, Bookscans is just that cool. Of course, that's assuming that I get another free afternoon sometime before I forget this fine aspiration and instead spend my free afternoon surfing web sites about homophonous phrases or some such thing.
Ed Gorman's column "Blog Bytes" featured The Rap Sheet, a blog that used to be a newsletter. Since I've been largely away from the blogosphere for the last year and a half, I missed the beginning of this terrific blog, so I have a lot to catch up with. But halfway down the page as of today, there was a really nice post about cover art, specifically mentioning one of my favorite examples, Fools Die on Friday, by A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner). It's one of the Dell Mapbacks, which longtime readers (both of you) know are my collecting passion, and might remember how happy I was to luck into a very good edition with the original cover--the racier one--a few years ago (the permalink to that post isn't working, since the site has been moved from Blogger to WordPress and back since then, and I haven't gotten around to fixing all the little things that went screwy during that process).
That post led me to another neat post at Vorpal Blade Online about collecting Dell Mapbacks. This post has lots of gorgeous cover scans, including the maps on the back covers.
And speaking of cover scans... the post at The Rap Sheet also led me to Bookscans, a HUGE collection of paperback cover art of the 40s and 50s. This project is so inspiring that I've decided that next time I have a free afternoon I will spend it scanning covers to send it the Bookscans guy. Yes, Bookscans is just that cool. Of course, that's assuming that I get another free afternoon sometime before I forget this fine aspiration and instead spend my free afternoon surfing web sites about homophonous phrases or some such thing.
permalink posted by The Vintage Reader @ 8:17 AM 
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