Why I love old paperback covers

I love looking at old paperback covers. It’s why I bookmark sites such as Books from the Crypt, or these looks at Ballantine’s 1970s Adult Fantasy covers. Or this link to the somewhat racier Carter Brown covers.
Part of it is because old books remind me of my teen and pre-teen years the way some people react to music (music from my teen years doesn’t trigger much in the way of memory—that had to wait until my twenties). I remember being young and curious and so awash with eagerness to read all those amazing books that sat on the bookstore shelves, waiting for me. Of course, at the high price of 60 cents, I couldn’t afford that many, so I had to ration carefully.
Even books I didn’t read have some of that nostalgic quality. The Carter Browns, which I flipped through in stores, were particularly influential
As you can see here

the covers had scantily clad women obviously getting ready to do something improper, and the stories themselves made it clear that between chapters, people were actually having SEX—by the standards of my teenage mind in the early seventies, that was wildly racy stuff. There were also plots and characters, but I mostly skipped all that to get to the racy bits.
More generally, I always thought of mystery novels as kind of realistic, compared to say, Andre Norton or Robert E. Howard. That is, they took place in the real world, so I figured my adult life would look something like that, except with fewer corpses.
Sometimes though, I just like the images. James Bama’s stunning Doc Savage covers defined the Man of Bronze look and they always screamed Cool Story! Buy Me!

Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy? Editor Lin Carter set out to get covers that looked notably different from anything else on the market. I think he succeeded admirably.

And then there’s distinctive style of this cover for Space Plague.

This was a style popular back in the 1960s and early 1970s, a cover which used lots of weird blobs and dots and blurs in ways that suggested some kind of altered SF reality without showing aliens, spaceships or supercomputers. Dinosaur Beach is another example.

I don’t think it’s that they’re better than today’s designs (all things being equal) but they share a special place in my heart.

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