Popular Culture Perceptions of the ARTIST Studio tour of Vintage Sleaze Paperbacks with Depictions of an Artist

Over the years while collecting obscure Vintage Sleaze paperbacks for a project, I accumulated a whole pallette of cruddy books based on the public perception of the passionate pleasures available to painters. Here are a few from the 1950s and 1960s...Share them all with your artist friends! See available books and affordable ebooks by Jim Linderman on BLURB.COM

Artists and their Models. Painters paint Vintage Sleaze Paperbacks

Representations of painters on paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s. The most recognized artist in America was Norman Rockwell at the time.  These ain't him.

Non GPS Vintage Paperbacks The Dell Series of Mapbacks

Long before GPS in our phones provided direction and Google Maps provided illustrations, the Dell Mapback series of paperback books ruled the racks.  If you would like an affordable hobby (especially if you aren't too fussy about condition) these colorful and downright cool paperback books with "scene of the crime" on the reverse are perfect.  Graphic and lovely.  I've put together groups of them all my life, then parted with them and started over.  Many antique malls have a few.  I will generally go 5 bucks each.  There are, I believe, some 500 of them.  Westerns, Romance, Murder and more, all with cute little "X marks the spot" maps. 

Harlemisms from New York Confidential Mapback Book Speak like an (Urban) Native

CLICK TO GET HEP, JACK

I have written about Mapbacks before, those beautiful mystery books from the 1950s which always had a map on the reverse indicating the scene of the crime and spots where certain events took place. I've collected them several times over my life, and finding them is still one of the most beautiful cheap hobbies around. There was one anomaly in the series.

Number 1534 was not a mystery, but an actual guide book to the city which never sleeps, and it was a guide book which held back little. From "Party Girls" to "Where Men Wear Lace" it was, I am sure, a well-thumbed book in 1951.

Alas, nearly everything in it is gone now. Yet it still remains one of the most valuable little documents of a world now gone, and one could do worse than bring back the wonderful "Glossary of Harlemisms" in back, Jack.

More New York City Mapbacks HERE
New York Confidential! The Big City After Dark by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer. Dell Paperback 1951 (Mapback) Collection Jim Linderman

Hitched in Hardboiled Heaven Hollywood Hi-jinks of Bellem and Barreaux

Robert Leslie Bellem did the words. Adolphe Barreaux did the art. Decades before Harvey Pekar wrote stories for others to illustrate, Bellem did the same, but his were goofy crime tales told in the Hollywood hills. Bellem was the auteur of the pulps...this one issue of Hollywood Detective is edited by Bellem, contains four articles by Bellem AND a "Dan Turner in Pictures" cartoon done by the two. It's nuts...but it works if you care to immerse yourself in one man's odd vision of fictional crime (supported by another man's vision of the scene.)

During his time, Bellem became something of a joke for his writing. 300 of his estimated 3,000 stories were about Dan Turner. S.J. Perelman satirized his work in a hilarious essay "Somewhere a Roscoe..." for the gumshoe slang he created...and he didn't have to work too hard to make it funny.

I can't put it any better than Kevin Burton Smith does on the outstanding Thrilling Detective website HERE "...it was the high-octane use of every slang word known to man (and more than a few Bellem must have coined himself) that fueled the tales. Women were wrens or frills, and their breasts were pretty-pretties or tiddlywinks, something that Dan, "as human as the next gazabo," always took the time to notice. Cars were chariots, money was geetus and no one ever got killed in the stories, they were croaked, cooled, iced, de-lifed or had an act of killery performed upon them. Guns didn't go bang – they were roscoes and they spat, coughed and belched. Or sometimes they just sneezed, though the end result was the same -- people ended up dead."

I guess when you write 3,000 stories, you reach a bit. I'm glad he did! I could spout the slang all day long and feel tough as nails, even if I am not. It is certainly no coincidence Bellem later wrote the story lines for the stilted Superman television series.

And seldom does an illustrator merge so well with a writer. Barreaux did more than draw, and was actually editor of Trojan Publications later...the company which put out Hollywood Detective. When the comics code came in and artists of his ilk were S.O.Luck and S.O. Work..he turned to producing "art" books with naked photographs of the dames he portrayed in his drawings. He even produced Bunny Yeager's Nudes!


Dan Turner Hollywood Detective (illustrated by Adolphe Barreaux, Story by Robert Leslie Bellem) from Hollywood Detective December 1944 Collection Jim Linderman

Dull Tool Dim Bulb Books HERE

Manhattan Mapbacks! Dell Paperback Maps of the Big Apple New York City on the Back of a Book

All great fake crimes take place in Manhattan. Sure, some happen elsewhere, but except for a few genre-creating masterpieces set in Los Angeles (okay...maybe they can claim a few) the dark, scary corners of the West Side are still the best place to fictionally stab or shoot someone. Dump them in the Hudson and they won't float up until spring.

Maps are snoresville...GPS killed them, and piles of the once familiar gas station freebie now fill baskets at the flea market. All of us still have a few crumpled and stuffed in the back of the glove compartment, still as ungainly and unmanageable as ever. I once drove from Manhattan to Los Angeles, a trip everyone should do, not only to realize the scope of the country but to obtain major bragging rights. 6 days for me...and I traced every mile on my faithful USA road map until the Petrified Forest in Arizona, when a big wind grabbed it right out of the car. I watched it fly down an ancient ravine, just like a recent automobile commercial which has sullied my memory.

By far the coolest paperback books are the Dell Mapbacks which were published from 1943 to 1951. I recently disparaged them in a post about a more obscure publisher...but they remain most collectible, mostly affordable and mostly available. And they are cool. My father, who visited me in Manhattan annually, used to love reading them and he would shout "I was there" a few times in each volume. Most were hard-boiled mysteries, the greatest fictional genre EVER. Shown here are a dozen or so Dell Mapbacks located in Manhattan. I do not believe there is one placed in the Petrified Forest.

A complete directory to the Mapbacks in shown HERE. There were hundreds, and all are great...but the ones set in the Big Apple were always my dad's favorite.

DULL TOOL DIM BULB BOOKS complete catalog and previews HERE