Cheap Thrills - An Informal History Of The Pulp Magazine
(2007 - Hermes Press)

[ - BELOW THE LINE - ] (by Ron Goulart). Note that the original edition of this title had almost no art examples to speak of, but in 2007, Hermes Press re-released the text jazzed up with a lot of well-reproduced pulp-magazine covers and some interior illustrations. It is far superior, so if you want this, make sure you are getting this Hermes Press edition (also, don't get confused by another edition that was released in the Seventies that left off the CHEAP THRILLS moniker and just used the sub-title AN INFORMAL HISTORY OF THE PULP MAGAZINE). Unfortunately, another enhancement the new editors established was an additional 53 pages of photo-reproduced original letters from many creators who figured in the history of the pulps. They are great reading, but mathematically reduced the percentage that the reproduced art contributed to the final product. With that said, I suspect that many art-pieces have not got as good a presentation anywhere else than they get here, so if you are a lover of this pulp-magazine-cover-art, you are going to want this tome anyway. Frustratingly, even though the artists' and their contributions frequently crop up in the text, they get short shrift in the captioning of the works, which is usually just identifying the magazine cover and the original copyright holders ( and there's a handful of times when even a magazine's date-identification is incorrect . . .). The artists of the 50 'well-presented' images break down like this: Walter Baumhofer (5), Rudolph Belarski, Frederick Blakeslee, Austin Briggs, Margaret Brundage (3)*, Samuel Cherry, Rafael DeSoto*, Robert Fuqua, Vernon V. Greene, Laurence Herndon, Frank Hoban, John Newton Howitt (4), Rockwell Kent, Tom Lovell, Paul Orban, Frank R. Paul (2), Clinton Pettee, Max Plaisted, George Rozen, Jerome Rozen, J. Allen St.John*, Donald VonGelb, H.J. Ward (3)*, Rudolph W. Zirm and UNKNOWN (14).

* - Note that the 'well-presented' pieces here by Ward, Brundage, DeSoto, and St. John, can all additionally be found so in their own collections up on The List.

other pulp cover collections

Savage Art