Sins Of The Fathers - Re-acquiring grails you once had.
When I got back into collecting vintage paperbacks 9 years ago, a distant, yet seemingly reasonable goal was getting back the 3 rarities I most regretted selling back in the 1990's
With the addition of the Studio Pocket Edition of Jim Thompson's "Sins of the Fathers" a year or so ago, the trio is back in the fold.
All three of my original copies were pulled out of the ceiling-high stacked boxes in the "store" of Mike, the Greenwich Village beatnik who sold his collection out of his basement apartment, many to me, in the early 1980's when I roamed West 4th Street in search of paper treasure.
I'll muse poetically a bit about Mike's Book Store in a dedicated post soon.
Sins of the Fathers by Jim Thompson (Studio Pocket No. 4, 1952), The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson (Lion Books No. 99, 1952), Reform School Girl by Felice Swados (Diversey Romance Novels No. 1, 1948)
If you've ever collected and purged and then collected again, it's a satisfying feeling to re-acquire books you once cherished. Kind of like entering the Twilight Zone and finding your younger self again.
Sins of The Fathers (Heed the Thunder) is a truly rare Thompson paperback with spectacular cover art and one of his most sought after vintage paperbacks.
The artist on this (Canadian) Studio Pocket is still uncredited after all these years but did such beautiful lines, suggestive yet undefined and artful eye candy. The hand pained title font adds to the custom and painterly look of the book. (Hand painted fonts are an art form themselves and could be the subject of a future post - all three books above have them. They add a custom look to these covers that standard fonts cannot achieve)
The Studio Pocket "Sins of the Fathers" is the second paperback edition of Thompson's second book. It is actually a Canadian edition, likely with a much lower print run than U.S. paperbacks. The blurb is quite suggestive, and the line does come from the book, albeit not in a scene resembling the cover.
The story inside promises "Heed the Thunder' is the story of rural America, stripped of pseudo respectability, richly revealed in its earthy boisterousness, its lust and greed, its humor and happiness, its stark cruel tragedies." It is actually pretty rollicking early Thompson, with many of the elements he later incorporated into his noir masterpieces like "The Killer Inside Me" but it's hard to describe other than a bit of a Hillbilly family history and multiple love stories rolled into one. Still worth a read if you like Thompson as you will chuckle at the Hillbilly patter and the comic/noir fate of his characters.
The first paperback edition is also Canadian (News Stand Library), and is also scarce and pricey and the cover art is cool but crude, and pales, in my estimation, in comparison to the artful Studio Pocket cover.
I've had a few opportunities to pick up the News Stand Library edition but I'm a cover art collector at least as much as a literature/1st Print collector and have never met one with a price/condition ratio that sang to me.
And besides, I got my old gang together again so do I really need it???
Love it, Lowell! Glad to say I’ve learned and bought from you at the beginning stages of my collecting (like the last year or two). Always learning. The Reform School Girl is tops on my list!
ReplyDeleteThanks Jeff, it's funny how re-living my old collection re-energizes me to move forward with the new. I still have grails to get!
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