Stand on the Saber (Last Stand at Saber River / Lawless River) by Elmore Leonard (Corgi, 1960)

This penultimate Elmore Leonard paperback – nearly done now – dates from the first phase of Leonard's career, i.e. 1951–1961, when he was writing nothing but westerns:

Last Stand at Saber River, the fourth of five western novels Leonard published over that period, issued as a paperback original in the States by Dell in 1959. Except, as you can see, this isn't that edition: it's the first British paperback edition, retitled as Stand on the Saber and published by Corgi in 1960 (Corgi #SW847). In fact the novel's title was changed twice for British publication: Robert Hale published it in hardback under the title Lawless River in 1959 (you can see a facsimile of the Hale dust jacket, along with jackets for others of Leonard's early westerns, at Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC), and Corgi changed it again the year after.

Copies of the Corgi edition are almost as scarce as the Hale edition – there are presently two Corgi paperbacks versus one Hale hardback on AbeBooks – but prices couldn't be more different between the two: less than a fiver for the Corgi; over two grand for the Hale. So you can see why I went for the Corgi edition – that and the rather nice cover artwork, which I've unfortunately been unable to identify, despite asking a couple of paperback experts. (A partial signature – "HARRY" in capital letters – is visible bottom right of the artwork, which prompted one of the experts to suggest it might be by American artist Harry J. Schaare, but Schaare tended to sign his work with his surname, lowercase, so I remain unconvinced.)

But the main reason I bought the book is I was curious to see how it compares to Leonard's later western, the terrific Valdez is Coming (1970), and indeed to his work in general in that second phase of his career from 1969 onwards, when he returned to writing fiction after an enforced break (the western market having pretty much dried up by the end of the '50s). Answer being, not especially favourably.

Oh it's not a bad novel, by any stretch of the imagination. The story of Paul Cable, a Confederate soldier who, having been injured towards the end of the Civil War, returns with his family to his homestead in the Saber River valley to find it overrun by a Union gang, it's a decent enough western, moves at a reasonable clip and has its fair share of tense standoffs and shootouts. But it's certainly not the equal of Valdez is Coming, nor of the non-western novels Leonard penned when he resumed his writing career (The Big Bounce, Mr. Majestyk, Fifty-Two Pickup, etc.). Though there are hints of the Leonard to come – notably the way he makes the ostensible villains of the piece at least as compelling, if not more so, than Cable – it lacks the economy, the subtlety, the depth of later Leonard – that wry, supple prose and ear for the vernacular in dialogue.

Leonard himself admitted as much in a 2009 Goodreads interview. "When I read those [early westerns]," he told the interviewer, "I would definitely say my style has changed. I think it started with one of the last westerns – I was trying to get a little more humour in it, but also to be more spare in the writing. [Prior to that] I was using pronouns and making a lot of noise with the writing." He was also, at least on the evidence of Last Stand at Saber River, using adverbs – something that would become strictly verboten post-1969, as outlined in Leonard's celebrated 10 Rules of Writing – number 4, to be precise, "Never use an adverb to modify the verb 'said'... he admonished gravely." Which of course follows Rule number 3: "Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue." Although if Last Stand at Saber River is any indication, Leonard learned his own lesson early there.

Right then. Just one final Elmore Leonard paperback to come: the last of his novels to be published as a paperback original in the States...

A Patricia Highsmith 1950s and '60s Corgi and Pan Paperback First Edition Cover Gallery

NB: see also the Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery.

With the science fiction segment of this run of posts on paperbacks done, it's back to the crime fiction, and a Patricia Highsmith paperback cover gallery, which I've assembled by way of an apology for the non-appearance of the next instalment in the Great Tom Ripley Reread. That series of posts, you might recall, stalled at the midway point of the Ripliad, Ripley's Game, back in September; I do still intend to finish off the Reread, but it'll have to wait till next year now. To tide us over, then, I thought I'd showcase the first five Highsmith novels to be published in paperback in the UK.

All of these British paperback first editions have appeared on Existential Ennui before, in various permutations, but they're worth showing off again, I feel, especially as I've rephotographed them all from previous appearances. Additionally, this time out I've included some bibliographic details: the unique Corgi or Pan number for each title, along with cover artist (if known), original UK publisher, and pub date. Enjoy.

Strangers on a Train, Corgi #905, 1952; originally published in hardback in the UK by The Cresset Press in 1950. Highsmith's debut novel, her abiding theme of two men becoming inexplicably and dangerously fascinated by one another is established right from the outset, as well as her fondness for chance and coincidence in her plotting. I've never been able to establish who the cover artist is on the Corgi paperback, but I can tell you it's an uncommon edition – certainly a lot scarcer than the Cresset Press or US Harper & Brothers first editions.

The Blunderer, Pan G153, 1958; originally published in hardback in the UK by The Cresset Press in 1956. The cover art here is by James E. McConnell, a selection of whose work can be found over at Pulp Covers. I'm not as keen on this, Highsmith's second novel (under her own name; as Claire Morgan she published The Price of Salt in 1952), as I am others of her works, but the game of cat and mouse between Walter Stackhouse and bookshop owner Kimmel does have its suspenseful moments. From here until Penguin picked up her softcover rights in the 1970s, Highsmith would be published in paperback in the UK by Pan, and the Pan editions of her next three books boast, to my mind, some of the best covers ever to grace her novels.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Pan G397, 1960; originally published in hardback in the UK by The Cresset Press in 1957. David Tayler is the cover artist here, doing a terrific job of depicting Tom Ripley, Dickie Greenleaf and the fateful murder in the boat. As fellow Pan cover artists Sam Peffer and Pat Owen reveal in this interview, the Pan stable of artists always read the novels they were slated to illustrate the covers of, and were pretty much left to their own devices in choosing which scenes to depict.

Deep Water, Pan G435, 1961; originally published in hardback in the UK by Heinemann in 1958. A glorious cover painting by the aforementioned Sam Peffer for this, Highsmith's fourth novel under her own name – one of only a handful of Highsmiths from the 1950s and '60s I've yet to read. I really must rectify that soon.

A Game for the Living, Pan G548, 1962; originally published in hardback in the UK by Heinemann in 1959. Highsmith's fifth novel wasn't by any stretch the final Highsmith to be published in paperback by Pan, but it was the last to sport a fully painted cover, which again is by Sam Peffer. By this point, Pan covers were starting to become either more photographic in nature or more design-led; painted illustrations still appeared, but usually incorporated into an overall design, as on the next two Highsmiths that Pan published in paperback: This Sweet Sickness, which they issued in 1963, and The Cry of the Owl, in 1965. By the time of the Pan editions of The Glass Cell and A Suspension of Mercy in 1967, Highsmith's covers too had become photographic.

Even by the late 1960s, however, Sam Peffer was still painting the odd Pan cover, as I'll demonstrate in the next post, with a pair of John D. MacDonald paperbacks...

True Blood: The Vampire in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (Corgi, 1960) and Justin Cronin's The Passage and The Twelve (Orion, 2010/2012)

Thus far in this series of posts on paperbacks, the books under discussion – if my incoherent keyboard-clattering claptrap could be characterised as such – have all been of a crime or spy bent: Edward S. Aarons's Assignment to Disaster; Richard Stark's The Green Eagle Score; Elmore Leonard's The Big Bounce. To mix things up a bit, then, I thought we could look at some science fiction and fantasy paperbacks next, beginning with this:

A 1960 British Corgi paperback printing of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. This is actually the second Corgi edition (Corgi #SS854), following the 1956 first printing (Corgi #T197, which in turn followed the 1954 US Fawcett Gold Medal original), which sported a different treatment and illustration on the cover – a head-and-shoulders illustration of the novel's protagonist, Robert Neville, the last man alive, set against a staked vampire in a barren landscape (presumably an interpretation of the book's burning vampire pit). Corgi were evidently happier with the artwork on the 1960 edition, however – which depicts Neville looming over his staked wife, Virginia – as for their next edition, in 1962 (Corgi #SS1213), they went with this:

Now, on first inspection, that appears to be the same painting as on the previous edition. Look closer, however – click on the picture to zoom in – and you can see that the artwork has either been painted over, or painted afresh. The brush marks are smoother; the areas of contrast on Virginia not so stark; and the underpainting is less visible, in particular on the hillock, where in the previous version, the pink "ground" can be clearly seen.

To be honest, I'm not sure which one I prefer; they both have their merits, as does the type treatment on both covers. Frankly, early Corgi editions of I Am Legend are so scarce – certainly moreso than Gold Medal editions, and those are pretty uncommon as it is – I may well keep them both.

I'd already seen two of the three movie adaptations of I Am Legend – the Charlton Heston classic The Omega Man (1971) and the eponymous 2007 Will Smith version (which I watched as a slightly unfestive pre-Christmas treat that year, and rather enjoyed) – before reading the book, but neither of those films really captures the essence of the novel. For one thing, in the book, the cause of mankind's downfall is unequivocally vampirism, not mutants or whatever the hell those creatures in the I Am Legend movie are; Matheson's interpretation of it, sure, but explicitly named as such. For another, the way the vampires verbally taunt Neville – barricaded in his brownstone – especially his neighbour, Ben Cortman, brings an added layer of cruelty and torture to proceedings. And where both adaptations pull back from the brink of outright nihilism, Matheson doesn't blink: the horror and despair is unrelenting, with every glimmer of hope quickly extinguished, right down to the final twist in the tale, which upends both ours and Neville's perception of his plight.

One thing Matheson does in I Am Legend is strive to establish a scientific background for vampirism – and it just so happens I've recently finished reading another novel which attempts a similar thing:

Justin Cronin's splendidly sprawling epic The Twelve (Orion, 2012) – which, I think, is the best "new" book I've read this year – the sequel to this:

The Passage (Orion, 2010). Obviously there are differences between Cronin and Matheson, not least being that the former's magnum opus is by this point well over a thousand pages long and still only two-thirds done, whereas the latter's novel barely troubles 150 pages. Even so, they both offer explanations for the vampire – except that they approach their explanations from different directions. In I Am Legend, Neville tries to determine the scientific basis of each symptom of the, on the surface, seemingly supernatural disease of vampirism – living death, fear of garlic, etc. – in order to arrive at a cure. But in The Passage and The Twelve, right from the outset Cronin painstakingly establishes the scientific basis for each vampiric manifestation – from an encounter with Amazonian vampire bats and consequent US military experimentation to, in The Twelve, the appearance of "familiars" – and builds a supernatural mythology from there. Interestingly, this sense of opposites meeting in the middle extends even to the root cause: in I Am Legend it's bacteriological, while in The Passage and The Twelve it's viral.

Anyway: onwards. And next, two paperback editions of a key work of dystopian science fiction, featuring an introduction by Kingsley Amis...

Book Review: The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury; Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952 (John Minton Cover); Corgi, 1955 (John Richards Cover)

Keep 'em peeled for that promised post on a special edition of the final novel by Peter George, co-writer of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, but in the meantime, and continuing the quest to get the total number of covers on the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s page up to 100 (currently it stands at 95), here's a book I bought at the last-but-one Lewes Book Fair, and which I also own in a paperback edition – the contents of which differ slightly from the hardback – purchased at last year's London Paperback and Pulp Bookfair:

The Illustrated Man, a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury, first published in the UK by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1952. This is actually the third impression of the British first edition, dating from 1958, but since I only paid seven quid for it, and jacketed second or third impressions start at around the £50 mark online, I'm not complaining. That wrapper was designed by John Minton, a very well known painter and illustrator linked with the twentieth century British Neo-Romantic movement (a school of art I'm quite keen on myself), and a number of whose works are held by the Tate, the British Council, and now, of course, by that similarly venerable institution, the Existential Ennui Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery. Ahem.

I was already pretty familiar with most of the stories in The Illustrated Man, having read them in various other Ray Bradbury anthologies over the years, but reading them again gathered together like this was quite instructive. For one thing, this time around I discovered new layers to some of them, such as "Kaleidoscope", which became less of a terrifying tale of being cast adrift in space and more of a meditation on mortality, regret and the importance of living life to the full. For another, I was struck by how Mars-centric many of the stories herein are. A number of them could have quite easily fitted into The Martian Chronicles – or The Silver Locusts, to give it its British title – Bradbury's second book, published just prior to The Illustrated Man – and indeed one of them originally did. Which brings me neatly to that other edition of The Illustrated Man:

The first British paperback edition, published by Corgi/Transworld in 1955 under a cover by John Richards. This version of the book was evidently printed using the US Bantam plates; not only is it set in American English – i.e. US spelling – but it contains eighteen stories, as opposed to the Hart-Davis hardback, which only contains sixteen:

Handily, the book's Wikipedia entry lists all the differences between editions, so I don't need to go into them here, except to note that anyone, like me, who owns the Rupert Hart-Davis edition of The Silver Locusts should be aware that "Usher II", which was omitted from that edition, can be found instead in the Hart-Davis edition of The Illustrated Man (but not in the Corgi paperback); and that not only is the table of contents in the Hart-Davis edition of The Illustrated Man different to the Corgi one, but the introductory prologue has been altered to account for having two fewer tales, changing

Eighteen Illustrations, eighteen tales. I counted them one by one.

to

Sixteen Illustration, sixteen tales. I counted them one by one.

So now you know.

So that was the 96th addition to Beautiful British Book Jackets – and as it turns out the 97th addition was also bought in Lewes; just last week, in fact, in one of this fair East Sussex town's many charity shops. And what's more, it may well have been the best Lewes Book Bargain yet...

The Phoenix Sings by Desmond Cory (Corgi Paperback, 1956)

Having added a couple more Desmond Cory dustjackets to my Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s page (alongside eight other new additions, bringing the total up to fifty), I figured it was about time I returned to Mr. Cory and his Johnny Fedora spy novels, chiefly because I've tracked down some more hard-to-find Fedora first editions, which I'll be showcasing later in the week. Before we get to those, though, let's take a look at a non-Fedora novel:

This is the Corgi paperback edition of The Phoenix Sings (cover art uncredited), published in the UK in 1956, a year after the Frederick Muller hardback. A standalone work, it's the first-person account of Adam Vane, a down-on-his-luck former British intelligence operative in Antwerp, who is recruited by a shady associate to smuggle diamonds to Amsterdam, consequently finding himself caught up in a deadly game of espionage. The official Desmond Cory Website has a little more about the novel here, including the fact that it was turned into a movie, Mark of the Phoenix, in 1958, directed by Maclean Rogers.

I spotted this copy on eBay and managed to nab it for £1.20 (plus postage, obviously, which took the total up to a staggering £2.35), which was quite the bargain, not least because The Phoenix Sings is virtually impossible to find in any edition; there is currently one copy of the Muller hardback on AbeBooks, but it's lacking a dustjacket, and there are no copies for sale whatsoever on Amazon Marketplace. See, as I mentioned in my initial Desmond Cory post in January, although Cory's novels are slowly being turned into ebooks, physical copies of many of his books are in decidedly short supply – with the honourable exception of the later Johnny Fedora novel Undertow, which is available as a print-on-demand paperback (and ebook) courtesy of Mike Ripley's Top Notch Thrillers imprint.

Certainly the next Desmond Cory novel I'll be showcasing – a very early Johnny Fedora first edition, one of three Fedora firsts I'll be blogging about in quick succession – is extremely uncommon, so much so that I had to go all the way (electronically speaking) to New Zealand to secure a copy...

Paperback Week: Honour the Shrine by Francis Clifford (Corgi)

This week, all week, Existential Ennui will be celebrating the humble paperback book. Because at a time when e-books look increasingly likely to eventually supplant the paperback, this most humble yet still special, versatile and fantastically successful format can surely do with some celebrating. While hardbacks, with their fancy wraparound dustjackets (and doesn't that 'jacket' just imply aloofness, a cut above, upper class?) and solid, dependable case binding are seen as the respectable face of book collecting and publishing, the poor little paperback, forever getting folded and creased and spine-cracked, stuffed in pockets and handbags and left on trains and in loos, is damned as disposable, discardable, destroyable. In second hand bookshops, hardbacks get to nestle snugly inside in the warm on specially constructed bookcases; meanwhile, outside, the paperbacks sit and shiver in dump bins, browning and warping in the elements. If jacketed hardbacks are the aristocracy of the book world, paperbacks are the lumpen proletariat.

Don't get me wrong – anyone who's read this blog will know that I do love hardbacks. But there is also a place for paperbacks in my collection too. Often their covers and design outshine their supposedly more sophisticated brethren. So this week I'll be singing the praises of the paperback, through a series of posts on recently acquired books, many of which I picked up at the London Paperback and Pulp Fair, which took place at the end of October in a swanky London hotel... or rather, in the basement of a swanky London hotel, in an anonymous, windowless, airless, smallish room – which kind of says it all really. Perversely, however, the first couple of paperbacks I'll be showing you didn't come from the Paperback and Pulp Fair (as you'll see, there'll be connecting threads between the books I show this week other than simply where they came from). They came instead from the good ol' internet. And we'll begin with this:

The UK first Corgi paperback edition of Honour the Shrine by Francis Clifford, published in 1957 (originally published in hardback by Cape in 1953). Clifford is the nom de plume of Arthur Leonard Bell Thompson, author of nineteen novels from 1953 to 1979, a mixture of thrillers and crime and espionage works. Like a lot of British – and American – thriller writers from the 20th century, he's increasingly overlooked, and his entire body of work is now out of print, with the exception of 1962's Time is an Ambush, which is available print-on-demand from Ostara Publishing. Ostara also have the best online biography of Clifford, which you can find here.

Honour the Shrine is Clifford's debut novel, a taut, first-person World War II tale centring on a British mission to blow up a bridge in Japanese-occupied Burma; the reason I picked it up (for a pittance, it has to be said) was because of a comment Book Glutton left on this post about Ross Thomas' Spy in the Vodka (a.k.a. The Cold War Swap), the back cover of which has a raft of glowing review quotes for Clifford's 1966 novel The Naked Runner (also published by Hodder, Thomas' UK publisher at the time). Slightly counterintuitively, though, rather than buy The Naked Runner, I bought Cifford's first book instead, mostly because it happened to float past my eyes on eBay. However, The Naked Runner does look like a cracker – certainly better than the supposedly rubbish Frank Sinatra-starring film it was turned into in 1967 – so I'll be returning to it in the not-too-distant future...

The publisher of this edition of Honour the Shrine, Corgi, was a mainstay of the British publishing scene in the second half of the 20th century, pumping out cheap paperback reprints of every type of fiction. Corgis don't seem to be as collectible as say, Pan, but they're still worth nabbing, as their painted covers can be at least the equal of more desirable paperbacks (I own a rather lovely 1952 first UK paperback edition of Patricia Highsmith's debut, Strangers on a Train, for example). The cover artist here is John Richards, and as is often the case, that bastion of decency and good taste Steve Holland has pretty much the only bio on him, right here. Go take a butcher's.

Patricia Highsmith First Editions, Part 1

UPDATE, October 2013: I've since put together an Existential Ennui permanent page, the Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery, drawing solely on the books in my own collection.

I mentioned I might do this, and unlike all the other times I mentioned I might post something and then never did, this time I'm actually doing it. Yippee. Here, then, are as many as I could muster of the first edition hardback covers – both US and UK – for all twenty-one of Patricia Highsmith's novels (excluding The Price of Salt, a.k.a. Carol, the novel she wrote as Claire Morgan). There are some gaps, so if anyone can help fill those in (if anyone even reads this...), let me know. I've bunged in a few paperback covers too, just 'cos I have them. Hopefully this'll be a useful resource for anyone looking into Highsmith firsts, but even if not, it's the kind of pointlessly nerdy thing that keeps me happy. (You'll be able to tell the books I own, as I've photographed – usually quite badly – the full opened-out dustjackets.) I'm splitting it into two parts (Part 2 directly above this post), otherwise this post would be huuuuge; plus, images are a pain in the arse to move about in Blogger. Enjoy!

1) Strangers on a Train
Top left: Harper & Brothers, US, 1950; top right: Cresset Press, UK, 1951; beneath: Corgi paperback, UK, 1952

2) The Blunderer
Top left: Coward-McCann, US, 1954; top right: Cresset, UK, 1956; beneath: Pan paperback, UK, 1958

3) The Talented Mr. Ripley
Top left: Coward-McCann, US, 1955; top right: Cresset, UK, 1957; beneath: Pan paperback, UK, 1960 (David Tayler cover art)















4) Deep Water
Left: Harper & Brothers, US, 1957; right: Pan paperback, UK, 1961 (Heinemann, UK, 1958 unavailable)

5) A Game for the Living
Top left: Harper & Brothers, US, 1958; top right: Heinemann, UK, 1959; beneath: Pan paperback, UK, 1962 (Sam Peffer cover art)















6) This Sweet Sickness
Harper & Brothers, US, 1960 (Heinemann, UK, 1961 unavailable)

7) The Cry of the Owl
Top left: Harper & Row, US, 1962; top right and beneath: Heinemann, UK, 1963 (John Bance dustjacket)

8) The Two Faces of January
Top left: Doubleday, US, 1964; top right and beneath: Heinemann, UK, 1964 (John Bance dustjacket)

9) The Glass Cell
Top left: Garden City/Doubleday, US, 1964; top right and beneath: Heinemann, UK, 1965 (M. Mohan dustjacket)

10) A Suspension of Mercy
Heinemann, UK, 1965 (Tom Simmonds dustjacket) (The Story-Teller – the book's American title – Garden City/Doubleday, US, 1965 unavailable)

11) Those Who Walk Away
Heinemann, UK, 1967 (Doubleday, US, 1967 unavailable)