Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Beacon Covers


Here are the covers for those books listed in the house ad in the previous post. Anybody know who Adam Rebel, J.T. Pritchard, and Jay de Bekker really were?




















6 comments:

Rittster said...

James, here's what one page says about De Bekker, though I have no idea how accurate this is:

http://gadetection.pbworks.com/Sterling,-Stewart

Here's one more page--scroll down to the fifth paragraph:

http://killercoversoftheweek.blogspot.com/2009/10/peek-boo-i-see-you.html

James Reasoner said...

Thanks for the info. If I ever knew that Jay de Bekker was really Prentice Winchell, I'd forgotten it. But I'm not surprised. That guy wrote a lot, and under several different names.

Anonymous said...

Hi James,

some sources like trussel.com says that Adam Rebel is a pen name for Tom Roan and there are a couple of Adam Rebel Stories in Western Pulps of the 50s. The most of them are the second Roan Story in the same issue.

Best regards

Thomas Block from Germany

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting the great cover art, James. I'm curious. Were the Beacon paperbacks displayed and sold alongside the other paperbacks from publishers like Gold Medal, Lion, etc.? Or were the Beacons segregated to something like an "Adults Only Reading" space?

Ed Lynskey

James Reasoner said...

Thomas,

Thanks for the info. I've liked most of what I've read by Tom Roan, so I may have to try to get my hands on a copy of STABLE BOY.

Ed,

I'm not quite old enough to have been browsing the paperback racks during the Fifties, but in the early Sixties books like the Beacons, Midwoods, etc., were segregated to their own area except in places like bus stations, where they were usually displayed openly, perhaps on their own spinner rack but it would be right next to the rack with the regular paperbacks on it. As various people have pointed out, though, the covers on even the regular paperbacks were much more daring then than they are now. It wasn't at all unusual to see paintings of carefully posed nudes on regular paperback covers. Robert McGinnis was an education for a growing boy, that's for sure.

Juri said...

The cover for PICK-UP sure is great! Thanks for these, James. I can confirm - well, by reading it from printed sources - that de Bekker is Prentice Winchell.