Monday, March 31, 2008

Those old-timey covers

While I was sitting watching Dancing with the Stars tonight, an email came in from my dad, who alerted me to an eBay seller's historical fiction listings. His name looked familiar, so I checked around and remembered I used to get his catalogs when I was in high school and undergrad (Pandora's Books). They were large format, newspaper style, very tiny print.

Anyway, take a look at the listings if you want to see many more examples of 1950s-70s style historical novel covers, such as the one on the left. I own many of the books in other editions, so I'm not really tempted to bid, but it looks like everything starts at 99 cents if you're so inclined.

5 comments:

  1. Oh, there's some beauts there! Thanks for the link.

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  2. I won the one I bid on--a Jan Westcott with a very tacky cover. Only 99 cents!

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  3. Very nice - hope we'll see the cover at some point!

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  4. I just bought the first two books of a Roberta Gellis's series (Alinor and Roselynde) as I read that they were must reads for historical novel fans and in particular are set in one of my favourite periods. As they are out of print I bought them second hand on the internet and the covers are brilliant. I sort of knew what to expect but the bodice ripping picture (literally) cover of Alinor is fantatsic. When my partner saw them he thought I had resorted to Mills and Boon in my reading and was not entirely convinced they were the serious historical fiction I usually read. The same goes for the Edith Pargeter's Heaven Tree Trilogy. You have go to love them and have them for the covers alon :-)

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  5. I don't think I ever owned the original editions of the Roselynde series, but I had some 1980s paperbacks that were rather colorful, though not of bodice-ripping quality. The covers all centered on a woman, with some vague medieval scenes in the background. But I just checked Amazon and they appear to have the original covers scanned in there. I swear the guy on the cover of Alinor looks like Fabio! (And the backdrop resembles India or Hawaii or some other tropical island rather than England...)

    I have never seen the Heaven Tree trilogy with a garish cover like that. How inappropriate!

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