Since his first movie was released in 1925, Alfred Hitchcock used literary sources for his film scripts, of course, but it wasn't until the late 1940s that he became part of a lucrative publishing venture. After the war, anthologies of judged fiction had become popular -- The Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize Winners series, for instance. Hitchcock was listed as a judge or editor for a couple of anthologies, though most people doubt the director played any part in the actual selecting of stories. The earliest such collection had an unremarkable cover and title.
The next collection,which came in 1947 and was called Alfred Hitchcock's Fireside Book of Suspense had a somewhat more colorful front cover. . .
. . .but it was the back cover which was of real interest.
Once we look closely at Farley Granger's book in this early scene in 'Strangers on a Train," we see Hitchcock's head shot on the back of the dust cover. This is one of the director's two cameos in the film.
This original little spate of anthologies with Hitchcock's name on the cover ended, but ten years later, when Alfred Hitchcock came into our homes via television, there was a new phase. Mystery and suspense stories were gathered, 12 or 13 at a time, and published with titles which began Alfred Hitchcock's... There were as many as sixty of these paperbacks. And the cover art collection has expanded over time to include some reprints, often with different cover designs, which entered the publishing market. For example, this close-up photo from a lot of old paperbacks for an online auction shows the same book with two different covers:
Obviously, Hitchcock moved to the United States to make his big-budget films and stayed on to do television, but he was British. His fans in the U.K. bought paperback anthologies put out by by Pan, a company which had some similarities to the American publisher Dell.
I took an interest in these Hitchcock books last year, during a search for a short story by a slightly-obscure author, and could find the tale in one volume: one of the the many Dell paperbacks with Alfred Hitchcock's face and likeness on the cover. I discovered, to my surprise, that some of these collections had some pretty good fiction in them. And those titles and covers -- wow!
This week and for the next week or two I thought I'd share some of the cover art from these books, which were published from 1957 till well into the 1970s, with some later spin-off series coming out in the 1980s.
This time, I'll focus a few paperbacks with covers/titles which are parodies or commentaries on specific moments in pop culture:
The film "I Am Curious (Yellow)" became I Am Curious (Bloody).
A saying from a comic strip dialogue balloon turned dark pretty fast.
The popularity of the Broadway smash hit / hit film "My Fair Lady" with its singable musical score inspired Get Me To the Wake On Time.
Here's a story collection which would not be ignored.
The last pop-culture example for today might be lost on many people, but the references in title and cover image are to the 1927 Yankees.
Next week: More book covers!
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