Category Archives: Book cover design

Melbourne launch details for Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950-1980

Posted on November 6, 2019 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Melbourne folk, please join myself and my coeditor, Iain McIntyre, on Tuesday, December 3 for the Melbourne launch of Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950-1980. Entry is free and the event will kick off at 6.30pm at the Old Bar, 74-76 Johnson Street, Fitzroy.

The book will be launched by Melbourne literary historian and pulp fiction fan, Stuart Kells. There will be readings from some of the novels featured in Sticking it to the Man, music from DJ Bruce Milne, and copies of the book will be available at a reduced price. We’ll also throw in a free pulp novel with every purchase. Kids are welcome.

I hope to see some of you there.

This is the second pulp and popular fiction related history book that Iain and me have done and it is a glorious, full colour volume. From Civil Rights and Black Power to the New Left and Gay Liberation, the 1960s and 1970s saw a host of movements shake the status quo. With social strictures and political structures challenged at every level, pulp and popular fiction could hardly remain unaffected. Feminist, gay, and black authors broke into areas of crime, porn, and other paperback genres previously dominated by conservative, straight, white males.

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Posted in Australian popular culture, Australian pulp fiction, Book cover design, Fawcett Gold Medal Books, Horwitz Publications, New English Library, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp paperback cover art, Scripts Publications, Sticking it the the Man Revolution and Counter Culture in Pulp and Popular Fiction 1950 1980

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Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950-1980, now available for pre-order

Posted on February 11, 2019 by Andrew Nette| 8 Comments

Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and Counter Culture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950-1980, is now available for pre-order here on Amazon.

The book is due out in the second half of 2019 from PM Press, who published Beat Girls, Biker Boys and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950-1980. 

From Civil Rights and Black Power to the New Left and Gay Liberation, the 1960s and 1970s saw a host of movements shake the status quo. With social strictures and political structures challenged at every level, pulp and popular fiction could hardly remain unaffected. While an influx of New Wave nonconformists transformed science fiction, feminist, gay, and black authors broke into areas of crime, porn, and other paperback genres previously dominated by conservative, straight, white males. For their part, pulp hacks struck back with bizarre takes on the revolutionary times, creating vigilante-driven fiction that echoed the Nixonian backlash and the coming conservatism of Thatcherism and Reaganism.

Sticking It to the Man tracks the changing politics and culture of the period and how it was reflected in pulp and popular fiction in the US, UK, and Australia from the late 1950s onward. Featuring more than three hundred full-color covers, the book includes in-depth author interviews, illustrated biographies, articles, and reviews from more than 30 popular culture critics and scholars.… Read more

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Posted in Black pulp fiction, Blaxsploitation, Book cover design, Pan Books, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Pulp Friday: Interview with book cover designer, W. H. Chong

Posted on June 22, 2018 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

W H Chong is book cover designer based in Melbourne. From his first cover design job, a souvenir booklet to mark 1990 Collingwood AFL Grand Final victory, he has gone on to become Design Director for Text Publishing and has won multiple awards for his covers for young adult fiction, crime, classics and literature. Below is an interview I did with him on what is involved in a good cover design and his favourite cover designs from the science fiction reading of his youth. It originally appeared in the now defunct online magazine Spook, in August 2015.

How did you get into book design?

The correct answer is by accident. I started designing newspapers in the eighties and then I started doing magazines in the early nineties. When Text Media [now Text Publishing] started as an imprint of books run by Diana Gribble in the nineties, I was there, so I did the design. Because in the old days, people just did stuff. It was all very much a case of people putting something together that they were learning how to do as they went along. Design just needed to be done. Some of it included books. That was no big deal. There was no specialty. You weren’t learning to be a neurosurgeon; you were just doing things with scalpels, so to speak.… Read more

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Posted in Book cover design, Pan Books, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Science fiction and fantasy

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Pulp Friday: The Riot

Posted on May 4, 2018 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

I am rather partial to a good paperback movie tie-in. And I love Pan paperbacks. So this book from 1969, which I had never previously seen before stumbling across it in a second hand bookshop this week, presses all the right buttons.

The Riot, the only novel credit I have been able to find for Frank Elli, was first published in 1966. It is the story of a cynical con who finds himself thrown into the centre of a brutal hostage situation when the prison he is incarcerated in, erupts in a riot. Apparently the novel was based on an actual riot in an Arizona prison in which Elli, a former inmate of the prison, had been involved in. Kirkus Review called it ‘powerful storytelling. It’s a brutal, black vision in which the cynical despair is offset by a cool, shrug shouldered presentation.’ That doesn’t sound too bad.

It was filmed as Riot in 1969 by Buzz Kulik, a director who appears to have spent most of his career doing television, starring Jim Brown in the main role, and Gene hackman. As was often the case with prison films in the 1960s and 1970s, the production utilised real life prison inmate and staff at the Yuma Territorial Prison that it was filmed in.… Read more

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Posted in 1960s American crime films, Book cover design, Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Gene Hackman, Jim Brown, Pan Books, Pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art

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Pulp Friday: The Man With the Brown Paper Face

Posted on February 23, 2018 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Welcome to my first Pulp Friday offering for 2018. Today’s book, The Man With the Brown Paper Face, published by Panther in 1969, showcases one of my favourite forms of paperback cover design, photographic cover art from the late 1960s/early 1970s.

I know the purists among you dig the painted pulp covers from the 1940s and 1950s, and I love them, too. But there is something wonderfully sensational and lurid about photographic cover design from the period I mentioned earlier and, in my opinion, the Brits were the masters of it.

Photographs began to replace artwork on paperback books from the mid-1960s on. Partly this was part of an effort by publishers to be seen to be moving with the times and look more modern. Partly it was a cost cutting measure, as photographic covers were cheaper than painted ones. But despite their cheapness, arguably because of it, many of these covers manage to evoke a dynamic, visceral, fly on the wall atmosphere that could often be quite stunning.

The Man With the Brown Paper Face is a good example. The cover utilises a man with a stocking over his head, posing on top of a scrapyard car, brandishing a star picket, which the photographer probably found nearby. Its nasty and direct and – I don’t know about you – but it instantly made me want to pick up the book.… Read more

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Posted in Book cover design, British pulp fiction, Crime fiction, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art

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