Monday, January 14, 2019

Thrift Shop Book Covers: "Farewell, My Lovely"

Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler, needs no introduction from me, but here it is anyway. The second novel to feature Philip Marlowe was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1940. The edition that caught my eye, and for more reasons than the cover (see the inscription on the title page below), is the 1976 mass market published by Vintage Books. The artist: Richard Waldrep

















The first paragraph:
It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro. I had just come out of a three-chair barber shop where an agency thought a relief barber named Dimitrios Aleidis might be working. It was a small matter. His wife said she was willing to spend a little money to have him come home.


But its the inscription that sold me the book:

7 comments:

J. Kingston Pierce said...

That's a wonderful, curious inscription. I'd love to know the story behind it. Thank you for sharing.

Cheers,
Jeff

Stephen Mertz said...

Noir novel (or short story) setup: so our Everyman protagonist goes to a used bookshop, buys this book w/this inscription & becomes fixated/obsessed w/the story behind the inscription. Of course it's a girl on the run who...well, there's the setup. I'm too lazy to write it.

Bill Kelly said...

The cover artist is Richard Waldrep. Walker Martin has a post relating to this on the mysteryfile blog: http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=39787. Other web searching finds the 1976 Vintage Books Big Sleep original cover art with Waldrep's signature present.

Anonymous said...

I was always torn between enjoying the way Waldrep's cover looked and being annoyed at the blatant swipe from the cover of the February, 1935 issue of the Nick Carter pulp magazine.

http://www.philsp.com/data/images/n/nick_carter_canada_193503.jpg

Much pulp cover art was so striking I guess we should be glad this kind of thing didn't happen more often.

John Hocking

Bill Kelly said...

Thanks for the heads-up, John. Blatant is right!

Prashant C. Trikannad said...

I have never read Raymond Chandler, partly because I have never come across his books.

Bill Kelly said...

https://www.fadedpage.com/csearch.php?author=Chandler,%20Raymond