TRASHY TUESDAY: BOOK HAUL – CARTER BROWN HORWITZ COVERS

Here are some more additions from a recent book haul. These three are early Australian Horwitz editions of Carter Brown novels.

First up is Ice Cold In Ermine (Horwitz, No. 55). This 1958 first edition is digest sized and has the longer author name of Peter Carter Brown on the spine and inside the cover.

The cover art is typical of those found on the Horwitz books from this period, with a pretty woman brightly painted in the foreground and threatening action in the background, usually in a single colour.

This cover works quite well, the background figures have a nice sense of menace to them and the redhead in the front has the arrogant, confident look suggested by the book’s description. The white of the ermine coat is perhaps a bit muted and a brighter colour would have helped bring her out more. As it stands she is a bit lost against the background.

This is the second in Brown’s (Yates’) series about secret agent and race car driver Barney Blain, which never did as well as his other more popular Al Wheeler and Danny Boyd series. The first in the series was Madam, You’re Mayhem (below)

This 1961 Horwitz International Edition of The Passionate features a cheesy cover with a amateur looking drawing of a woman with green hair (dye job gone wrong?) sprawled on a mohair rug on what seems to be a checked lino floor. The poor woman appears to have only half a small finger on her left hand and her right leg is just a lump. Not great cover art!

The Passionate was originally published in 1959. It was subsequently reprinted in America where it gained a nice Robert McGinnis cover.

This 1961 first edition of Carter Brown’s The Exotic (Horwitz, No. 94, 1961), has a cartoon styled cover, which seems to have been briefly popular in the early 1960s. A number of the Carter Brown Horwitz books from this period had similar styled covers (see at the bottom of the post for more examples).

The cover has a trendy early 60s feel to it and makes good use of its bright colours, particularly the red, purple and green splashes. It is quite good, although I suspect not as effective as the more alluring covers that followed it.

Horwitz published a second edition two years later in their International Edition series, (Horwitz, No. IE 30, 1963), which had a more traditional cover (see below).

It was also released in America by Signet in 1961 with a nice Robert McGinnis cover.

A couple of the more cartoon styled covers:

As I continue to sort through the book haul from Bungendore I will post more pictures and comments.