Yareah Magazine

By James Morrison 

From the late 1940s to the 1970s, a lot of classic fiction was published by publishing houses like Signet, Pocket Books, Panther and the New English Library--publishing houses not always known for their restraint or commitment to literary values.

The classic books they tended to publish were usually chosen on the basis that they had an air of sensationalism about them: preferably sex and murder (or both together). For these purposes, French writers like Émile Zola and Honoré de Balzac were ideal. They were French (and everyone knew how saucy the French were), they were out of copyright, and they wrote books full of prostitutes and killers.

Zola in particular suffered the full force of this approach: the cover designs of many of his books from this era make them look like the work of a depraved Barbara Cartland.

Here are one of the covers for La Bête Humaine, about a man who suffers Jack-the-Ripper-style compulsions.

The Kill/La Curée gets a similarly lurid treatment.

Despite being a story about love, desire and murder, Thérèse Raquin gets away with some dignity intact… but  it's with Nana, the story of a prostitute's rise to a position of power and influence, that these publishers really went to classy town.

That last cover, by the way, is described by some book dealers as one of the first examples of 'Good Girl Art' to feature unambiguous, visible nipples. Zola's many other books received similar facelifts: here is one of the most memorable.

I had never previously suspected that the three faces of desire would specifically be those of (1) a woman wearing no underpants, (2) a woman wearing a maternity dress made from her granny's curtains, and (3) a Pomeranian. Silly of me, really.

*Yareah magazine es una revista cultural fundada y dirigida por el escritor Martín Cid: http://www.martincid.com
**Created and edited by the writer Martin Cid: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Read more about James Morrison:

http://www.bookslut.com/authors.php?author=James%20Morrison.