Vintage Paperbacks and More!

       This is the third year in a row that I've flown out to LA from Tampa to the biggest Vintage Paperback show in the country at the Glendale Civic Auditorium. I continue to come out here because I've had such a good time hunting down rare books for my collection and meeting other collectors and dealers. I'm not going to type too much but will try to post lots of pictures that capture the feel of the show and hope it inspires collectors to give it a shot in the years to come.      The trip started out great with a dinner last night with an "Old School" collector, Pat Lee and his lovely wife, Sheila. I met Pat online in a Facebook Paperback Group and could always tell that he was a swell guy and boy did he sure live up to that preconception. He had some great stories about vintage paperback collecting, including attending Lance Casebeer's legendary "Lance Cons".       He knows my colleague Bruce Brenner, who helped greatly in asse...

         When you start to root around the internet more and more looking for art and facts, you may tend to run into more and more interesting stuff!      I encountered Lynn Maguire recently posting on a Facebook group where she was selling original posed photos taken and/or used by her father, legendary PB cover artist Robert Maguire, as studies for his original paintings sold to the paperback publishing houses for use as their cover art.        Ms. Maguire has confirmed something that I have long suspected - that the cover art to one of the hobby's most famous books, Jim Thompson' s "The Killer Inside Me", Lion Books No. 99, was indeed painted by Robert Maguire.          She mentioned that to me that she confirmed this when she found pose photos of the woman lying dead in the foreground of the cover, and several poses of her father as the man in the painting. She indicated that her father very o...

       Sin Pit by Paul Meskil Lion Books No. 198 1st and only Lion Edition March 1954   Sublimely skanky cover art, uncredited but I believe it is by Lou Marchetti.   This very nice copy is probably the greatest one-hit wonder in all of noir. Regarded as a top noir crime/mystery novel and one of my favorite vintage paperbacks. The back cover blurb is so good.          James Reasoner gives it a good go at a review here   Some interesting factoids about Meskil's true crime career here   This copy came from the Vintage Treasure Chest collection, which was a large collection out of Southern Connecticut that came to market on eBay in 2022-2023. I bought a ton of these mostly high grade books at auction and ended up buying out the remainder from the seller when he got tired of listing individual books.