2.08.2009

Sultry Sunday #21 - The weekly "Pop Sensation" crossover

Peer into the shocking world of ... "The Farmers Hotel"

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Paperback 197: Bantam 1594 (1st ptg, 1957)
Title: The Farmers Hotel
Author: John O'Hara
Cover artist: Barye Phillips



Best things about this cover:

  • It's @#$#ing John O'Hara and the best blurb provider you can get is Book-Of-The-Month Club News!?!?
  • The design on this cover is Fantastic. It's all a bit too cramped with text for my tastes, but the pictures, small though they are, are vivid and dramatic, and the use of color blocks to build a hotel-like structure - inspired! I especially like how "John O'Hara" functions visually like a chimney and the "S" in "Farmers" is hanging out there like a rain gutter.
  • Hey, is that "Carrie Corrupted" sharing a drink with Joe Bow Tie? At first I thought that she was on her cell phone, but I think it's just a cigarette.
  • Is the lady with the G.I. a. dead, b. really drunk, or c. looking at an airplane flying overhead? Her neck is oddly ... unhinged.
  • You really don't want to check into the Red Room. That is the lesson I gather from this cover.
  • Paperback publishers must have loved O'Hara. He was a writer of "legitimate" fiction who sold off the racks and could be made, with very little fudging, to sound like a writer of soft-core sex fiction. The fifties were all about trying to get glimpses of "brief, shocking intimacy" without being called a perv.

Best things about this back cover:

  • The G.I. and his lady have moved to a small cabin and are now fighting / dancing.
  • Love the campy, dramatic quotation from the Times!
Page 123~

The quiet of the room was almost total, but not peaceful.


~RP

2 comments:

BikerPuppy said...

The woman in the red room must have dropped something down her blouse and is trying to find it.

JamiSings said...

Either that or she has one heck of a migraine headache coming on.