 You poor people. Good morning. Thanks for coming by. I'd like to talk to you today about a project I did with a friend of mine, a paperback publishing imprint called Hard Case Crime. In 2003 I was working as a creative director and writing novels at night and I had a friend named Charles Arda, he would founded an ISP called Juno and he was writing mystery stories at night. So shortly after he sold Juno to a bigger firm, I took him out for his birthday to a Japanese restaurant near Grand Central and I said you're out of a job now and you have a few dollars in your pocket. What do you want to do next? And he said I want to bring back the old gold metal paperbacks. So in case you don't know about gold metal it started with this. This is James Watts patented steam engine circa 1769. It not only kicked off the Industrial Revolution but it paved the way for the first steam locomotives by the middle of the 19th century. Rail travel was common and for the first time large numbers of people were regularly traveling long distances and they all needed something to read. So soon each railway station had a newsstand like this where you could buy a newspaper or a magazine that looked something like this. But as chromolithography gave way to offset printing at the turn of the century magazine started looking like this. It was the heyday of the old pulp magazines. They had magazines catering to all different tastes. There were Western romance adventure, war stories and crime. I have a real soft spot for this one particularly the guy on the foreground who was blasting away with a 45 with one hand and examining forensic evidence under a microscope with the other. I would say he's the complete package. Anyway it was a big market and people were looking for other ways to exploit it and eventually somebody thought what if you took popular novels and reprinted them as small books using newspaper presses and cheap newsprint. Please and sold them like magazines at newsstands rotating them regularly so they were always new and exciting. Please note the series title if you can read it. Railway library. Paperbacks themselves are not new. Books have been published in paper covers since the late Renaissance but this was a new approach. Small sizes, low prices, low production quality, high quantity and unorthodox distribution channels. In Germany you had Replementauschnitz and later in the 1930s you had Albatross and then just a few years later in the UK Penguin Books. It was launched just a bit after the highly successful Albatross imprint and oddly enough it had exactly the same page size, the same color-coded covers, the same order form included inside and even a seabird mascot centered at the bottom of the cover. Alan Lane publishing visionary. Penguin inspired pocket books in the US in 1939 who are said to have pioneered the use of revolving wire racks. This was pocket books first title and like the whole line it was hugely successful and this led to the way for a flood of books from other publishers who wanted to get in on the new paperback book. You'll notice here many of the same visual strategies developed for the pulp split stripped down typography and sometimes a bit of formal experimentation. One early US pulp magazine publisher in the US was Fawcett whose flagship title was a humor magazine named for the publisher and a type of high explosive shell and they wanted a piece of all this. In 1945 they signed a deal with New American Library to distribute their mentor and signet titles and paperback in this contract prohibited Fawcett from publishing their own paperback reprints but Fawcett had an idea for getting around this. What if you published original paperbacks books that had never been done before in hard covers? To do this in 1949 they launched Gold Medal. Gold Medal is generally credited for inventing paperback originals or PBOs and that's not strictly true but it was the first publishing imprint devoted to them exclusively and they remained a leader in the field for a quarter century. The idea behind this new kind of paperback is that it would be sold like magazines. There would be no bookseller to recommend it. There would be no reviews to get the word out and no big name authors. You'll notice that the author names here are often very small Richard Prather would be an exception. He was a star back then but Daykeen and Leonard Prinn are fairly incy and sorry the covers had to sell themselves the way magazines did and they used the same tools intense color, bold design, violence and sex. Before I go any further I should probably say a few words about paperback originals and the representation of women. These books were made by men for other men and the covers are all about the male gaze. The women in these books are the best of them are often complex and impressive. The women on the covers are not. At one point I tried to do a taxonomy of PBO cover imagery but I had to give up because it wound up looking something like this. The women were there to be decorative and to make men want to take the books out of those revolving wire racks and carry them to the cashier and I'm not going to try to defend this. But I will say that Western civilization throughout history has been a fairly racist sexist affair and that art made in that kind of a society will necessarily be encoded with different kinds of bigotry including sexual victory. If you love the art you try to work around it and we love this stuff. These covers were produced in-house by anonymous art directors with massive workloads and limited collections of type and the speed with which they were designed and their single-minded focus on selling gave them a certain vigor. They were not lukewarm. They were not careful. They were not beige. Some of them were beautifully painted and designed and some of them were terrible in interesting ways. There was a lot of formal experimentation. This is a lovely Robert McGinnis painting and we are going to be hearing from him later on. And some of them were just nuts. And some were really, do we need a bit more of that? Okay, right. And some were very stylish. We also love another Robert McGinnis. We also love the books as objects. They were laminated with acetates sealed with cellulose varnish. They had a soft satin-y sheen and the newsprint newsprint pages in the old days with yellow very, very quickly and the books wouldn't look fresh on the racks. So to counteract this and to give them more shelf appeal, they were usually tipped in brilliant colors. And with age, these colors become very rich and subtle and they have a wonderful velvety feel and a sweet smell. And the fact is, even if you're a modernist and in my professional life as a designer, I am pretty much a modernist, sometimes you need a break from this. We really loved these books. So, Charles and I started to talk about it. And a plan for the new gold metal began to take shape. We would focus on hard boiled fiction. We would publish new writers, but also the best of the old. No Hammett and Chandler or other famous hard boiled writers. We're still in print, but Day Keen and David Dodge and Wade Miller and other writers who had done a few strong books and were now forgotten. Our books would look like the old ones. We'd get brilliant painters to do painterly old school covers. We'd tip the pages in bright yellow to match the redesigned gold metal mark. We'd make them rack size and skinny like the old ones, which would let us sell them really cheap. And this would get us a lot of attention and promote impulse buying. The books would have crossover appeal. There'd be something for mystery fans, something for hipsters and something for the genre buyers at Walmart. Now, all this raised certain questions of authenticity of homage versus pastiche of appropriation. Would we be making a Disney-ish theme park facsimile of the past? We wanted them to be a bit cheesy, but would they be the wrong kind of cheesy? We figured we'd sort all that out as we went along. The point was we had an idea we loved and we thought we had a pretty good idea of how we could make it work. Then we began to look into the matter a bit more closely. In 1982, gold metal was acquired by Ballantyne Books, a division of Random House, and Random House was not interested in licensing the name. Improvements of paper in paper in the late 20th century made it unnecessary to hide yellowing edges with colored dyes. And since some of the dyes involved were toxic, very few printers offer the service anymore. The new polypropylene films in UV-cured liquid laminations were tough and plasticky and they produced a very high gloss. We tried matte lamp but that killed the colors. We found that genre buyers at Walmart are not interested in old stuff. They want things to be new and shiny. And we found that in spite of all this, you couldn't do anything that you couldn't put on the shelves at Walmart's. No paperback distributor would touch a books that might offend Walmart shoppers, some of whom were very conservative, heartland Christians. This introduced us to the concept of implied nudity. Here you see a cover that was perfectly acceptable in 1966. But because of implied nudity, Walmart would not sell it today. You see, even though we can't see the modesty blazes, breasts, those guys can. And that means it's no go. Nobody wants to buy a skinny book. People don't feel they're getting enough to read. And no one wants to sell a cheap book because booksellers are not interested in 40% of a $4 book. It's not worth their time to shelve it or inventory it. And the audience from mass paperbacks is aging and younger readers do their reading on screen. Our first publisher, Dorchester, went bankrupt in 2012. Our new publisher, Titan in the United Kingdom, basically will not do our books rack size except in very special cases. Now, we obviously did not know all this in 2003 and four, but we were learning more every day. And most of what we learned was not encouraging. We decided to go ahead anyway. So it was time to go to work. Neither was for a member who came up with the name hard case cry. But I remember we liked the yellow ribbon because it was in the tradition of the metals, crests and seals you saw for the old PBO publishers who wanted to give their cheap, shoddy products a touch of class. And we wanted to be able to say this, we call this the model box. And it appears on all of our books. The mismatched typefaces are part of the point. We mismatched a lot of typefaces just like the old guys with limited typecases and limited time. The blobby lettering and graphics were not the old photo stats, which is how you carried logos around before dot a files. A good photo stat is a beautiful sharp thing. But once you make a photo stat of the photo stat and then make stats of those, it starts to get soft and blobby and that's the look we wanted. We bled the colophon off the top edge in the upper left corner, just like the old gold metals. And I do want to say one last word about the colophon. I was doing a hard case in part to take a break from modernism, but it's hard to stop being a modernist once you've started. And the logo is built on a grid. Now, in the 1930s, when the visual language of cheap American paperbacks was being established, one of the key things the publishers wanted was to look new and exciting. Now, what was new and exciting in the 1950s, 1930s? Well, this was pretty new and exciting. The Bauhaus opened up a lot of possibilities, asymmetry, angle type and a break from the tyranny of the central axis. And they used a lot of 19th century jobbing faces, grotesques and some slab-serve types. And so did we. The other thing that was still pretty new and exciting was the talkies. The main source for PBO tropes and strategies was the pulse, but the new breed of movie poster was also an influence. You saw a greater influence, willingness to mix it up with asymmetrical and angle type and lettering and a bolder use of montage, which was another favorite mode for Bauhaus graphics. The types we chose included these new modern slab-serves that that she called like so much. And one did own, which was especially popular because it was bold and narrow enough to make a strong showing on a small cover. When it came to Bauhaus Influences, this was, of course, the big daddy, especially the bold condensed version, which was, it came very close to being the default PBO type face. There were also the modern interpretations of the old jobbing grotesques. This was a very early superfamily, when ATF was put together out of I think 23 other type foundries, they had an immense catalog of numbered grotesques, completely miscellaneous and random, and Morrisville event was tasked with organizing them into some kind of a usable and coordinated large family. Franklin Gothic was an early, was an early effort in this direction, trained Gothic was a line of type was under done along similar lines. Alternate Gothic was another such effort. And we did use one late and drink. Even though this was designed in 1994, it had the same purpose and the same spirit as the old as the old grotesque superfamilies. And it also came in a really useful range of weights and weights. Now, the interiors of the book were brutally simple. Like the originals in the old days, something as interesting as this would be an exception. This is an armed services edition soldiers have carried paperbacks and the rucksacks and the civil war and every war since and in the Second World War, the US government distributed free arms forces editions, armed services edition for soldiers. They were printed landscape in two columns, they could fit into a uniform breast pocket. And they were meant to be thrown away after one reading, but mostly the interiors were crude functional affairs, single column center axis meant to shoehorn copy into the smallest skinny as the books possible. We didn't think it would be nice if we picked a handsome face for headlines and chapter numbers. And I think you'll agree this is a pretty good one. We also needed body copy. So the obvious choice would have been Times Roman, which then as now is was omnipresent after its introduction into the US market in 1942. The problem was that we had the opposite problem. The old guys we had to pad out old 50,000 word quickies into a market of a size. So while space saving times would have been pretty, it would have been an obvious choice. We needed something more expansive. And we settled on Caledonia tracked out a bit to make it look more like metal. It added 12% to the lengths of our books. And a lot of the time we needed that. So here's how the title page is turned out. And here's a text page old paperback originals did not usually use N slugs, but they sometimes did. And we had fun designing this one and using it. And here's some of the back ads. I'm kind of proud of the fact that we made the URL look just a little bit period. The spines were easy. The old spines were often most often plain white with red and black type. And that's what we did. This also had the advantage of standing out on the shelf since these days, most spines are colored. As far as the back covers are concerned, the main thing in the old days was speed. You just couldn't spend much time on them. And often you didn't have much to say because the PBOs weren't blurred. Our approach was to set up a simple one approach was to set up a simple standard text only template with a simple border and use it for everything. The other approach was to just knock something out at random for each title and not worry too much about it. And we kind of like the sound of that. That's the way we decided to go. One thing we did consider was color. Back in the old days, if you wanted to use composed colors, every CMYK tint that you added was a separate a separate zinc block from the engraver and that cost money. You didn't want to spend money. So you focused on simple colors that need one or two blocks and still have a lot of impact. And these are the colors you saw everywhere. So we didn't limit ourselves to this, but we focused on these. And here's well, one of our covers that covers turned out. It's got a beautiful painting there by Michael Kelch. And here's another. This was actually Mickey Spillane's last novel unfinished at his death. We convinced the estate to let us finish it and publish it. We had one of our best authors do it. And that is a beautiful Robert McGinnis painting. Once again, more about him later on the front. Even though most back covers were kind of nothing in the old PB does, PBO days, there was one notable exception. The old Dell map backs who did beautiful diagrams and illustrations of the settings of the novels on the back. And we were very happy when we got a chance to do one of our own. And that illustration is done by a wonderful map maker and illustrator we found called Susan Hunt Yule. Okay, very often when people try to emulate hard boiled style, you get something like this. And that's how you know the designer has no idea what a PBO looks like. The Indiana Jones logo was based on old pulp magazine, name plates like these. And by the way, if you think women were poorly treated in the old pulp magazines, you should see the treatment people of color got. This kind of work with outlines, drop shadows and gradients generally was way too labor intensive for a single PBO title. You could only afford to do this if you were going to amortize your investment over the course of a few years. So we did not use this sort of thing for cover treatments. kinds of cover treatments we looked at with ease. This is the most common kind of title treatment. And it was also the most basic was a bold, condensed songs. The cover on the right was a common format for series books like the ones for Shell Scott and Mike Shane. And we will be getting back to it later. So this approach was simple, safe and generally effective. And it usually meant someone was in a hurry. Another approach, the second commonest approach was a slap surf. And I would say this had a similar rationale. Also, a lot of art directors would attempt script because scripts are sort of dynamic. But this is difficult because, you know, they weren't sending these jobs out to Tommy Thompson. And most in house art directors, then is now couldn't letter very well. So you'll notice the one on the right, which looks a bit nicer is actually tight. This one, the one on the right. It looks a little nicer, but it could almost be announcing a spring sale at Bon Whitteler. So this at any rate was another characteristic style. And the thing that's always struck me about it is that it seems filled with a bizarre kind of enthusiasm. An extremely popular style was this sort of distorted off kilter approach, which I think was pretty attracted to most art directors because it didn't seem to take much skill. But it's still gave you a kind of hip, jazzy look. And the message here was that the book on offer was pretty wild, maybe with a whiff of marijuana. Then there was the horror movie look and stencil, which was trendy back then too. But in those days, stencil had a much more earnest feel. And it signal that the book was going to deal with a very important societal problem. Calligraphic titles or rather calligraphy inflected titles were reserved for books with some pretension to quality. It helped if they had historical settings or were in some way exotic to American readers. And lastly, a bouncy did own suggested that this book was hot stuff. When it came time to commission the cover illustrations, we discovered one more fact of life. There's a smaller supply of skilled realistic painters these days. The rise of photography and Photoshop have made it harder for illustrators to survive. And art schools these days are not so focused on life drawing and painting. So our first thought thought was, let's begin by talking to some of the great old guys. In most cases, this was not practical of the guys that were still alive. When we launched our case, James the body had lost his sight and stopped painting. And his good friend Stanley melts off has also basically retired. We talked to Robert McGuire, who was wonderful at a convention. And he very sadly said, you wouldn't want me these days. I'm just not that good anymore. And we couldn't get through the Mitchell hooks. That left one guy. He hadn't painted a paperback cover in a couple of decades. But he was possibly the finest painter of them all. He had been called the king of paperbacks. And he was the last man standing. Most people know him for painting this gal. And this guy. We were very happy when he agreed to be part of our case. I found a painter called Greg Manchester. He's an illustrator with a closet full of gold and silver society illustrator's medals and we could not come close to affording his rate. But he liked what we were doing. And he liked the fact that we pretty much got gave him carte blanche. And Glenn Orbeck was basically a comic book cover artist, but he seemed to have the right spirit. And in the end, he became more than anyone else the visual mainstay of the line. He did over two dozen covers for us and many of them are among the strongest ones we've done. And I wish we could say we were still working with him. But earlier this year, he succumbed to cancer at the age of 52. He was a great artist, a complete pro and a lovely man to work with. And we will miss him. We could not have done the line as it is. One spark of brightness in all this is that his wife Laurel Blackman is also a very fine painter. And at the very end, when he was too sick to fulfill his last commission, she stepped in. And she did it for him. I can't show it to you now, because it hasn't been released yet. It's gorgeous. And we she's working on the second hard case commission now. And we hope for a very long partnership with her. So here's a few of the books themselves. I want to talk briefly about fade to blonde, not just because I wrote it, but because there's a little bit of a story behind it. I am or was a novelist, but I didn't get into this to write a novel. I got into this as someone interested in the design. But when I was working out the cover issues, I needed I needed a title and a tagline and, you know, a name to use just for sample covers. And, you know, we weren't doing that. She'll have it. I'm not going to do the Molotys Falcon. So I just made this up fade to blonde. She was a little taste of heaven and a one way ticket to hell. And I made up a Pope writer. Thank you. Thank you. It's still in print. It's still in print. And I made up a Pope writer named Forrest DeVoe Jr. Anyhow, I was working on this one night. I thought, this kind of interesting. I wonder how it would be if somebody actually wrote a book with this title and this tagline. So I opened up word. And I began making a few notes at eight o'clock the next morning, I had a first chapter, and it was time to go to my day job. And so that's how I got started writing fade to blonde, which one of us got first chain this award. It was a lot of fun. I did it at a 2000 day word, a day clip like the old guys, not letting my stop self stop and revise. That was really nice. Okay, here's a book by Samuel Fuller with psycho jazzy lettering. Here's some murderific lettering for novel called false negative. Here, if you remember the old Mike Shane series look, we always wanted to do one of those. And we finally got the opportunity to do that for our own Max Allen Collins, who has published God knows how many books with us at this point. And we reprinted some of the early ones in a series like this with an old Robert McGinnis illustration. Ellison, there were a number of the old science fiction guys who used to write whatever people would pay them to write. And this is an early street punk, you know, novel from the 50s with a beautiful plan or the cover. This is rejected lettering for our second Stephen King original novel. The sales force said, what the hell is that? And I said, this novel has a carnival theme. And this is old show card style lettering. And I said, Stephen King never has brush lettering. I like that. And I said, Well, maybe now he can he said, how will people know it's the same Stephen King? Go argue with a publishing sales person. Okay, some modified horror risk for Madison Smart Bell, some classy calligraphy for Gore Vidal, who also when he was young and struggling, did a pot boiler, a crime novel with an exotic locale and another beautiful Glen Orbit painting. And this was actually James M. Keynes last novel also unpublished. And we worked for years to let the estate to we work for the resume on the estate before they let us clean it up a bit and publish it. Because it was very far gone at that point. And it just wasn't very good. We thought there was good stuff in it, though. And it was James M. Keynes. So we cleaned it up a bit and shoot it out the door. In order to do this one, the editor sent me pics of mid century cocktail bar signage. And that was that was the reference I used. We never got to revive gold metal. But we did get to revive some of their books. Branded Woman, another great Glen Orbit painting, one of our favorites. Stop this man, Robert McGinnis. Another McGinnis for the girl with a long green heart. She had a grifter's soul. A touch of death, Charles Williams, lovely puff, chalk, chalk, chalk pile cover. And this is interesting kill now pay later. Robert Terrell is Robert Kyle's real name. And these are two Robert McGinnis paintings for the same title 50 years apart. Michael Crichton, when he was in he paid his way through med school by writing one thriller a year under an assumed name. And we got his estate to let us have those. This one's called binary. Another Glen Orbit. Clunder the Sun with a beautiful bomb. And say it with bullets by the guy who this is serious stuff. We get denied by the guy who created the pink panther. This is a comic novel and we thought it would be okay if we made the cover a little extra camp and baby more, which aside from the title, what do you need? You also have another Bob McGinnis here. And I should point out that a few of these, including this one, were designed by Steve Cooley. I took a hiatus from the line in the for a few years because I was kind of maxed out on time. And Steve Cooley of Cooley Design Lab stepped in and did some beautiful covers like this in style that the house style that we had set up. So we have today published over 100 books. And we have published some authors I never thought we'd get anywhere near along with Stephen King and Gore Vidal. We have Watergate conspirator conspirator E Howard Hunt, who believe it or not, actually started out as a very good hard boiled crime novelist, Robert Block, Lawrence Block, James M. Cain, Pete Hamill, Michael Crichton, Mickey's Blame, Cornell Wolrich. And like I said, there were a few science fiction guys who started out doing a bit of crime to pay the bills, Roger Zalazny, Robert Silverbill, and AC Doyle, whom you may know best is Arthur Conan Doyle. Our original novels of one awards, including two shameless awards and an Edgar and people have said some very kind things about them. This came from an actual paper letter that Mickey's Blame wrote us shortly before his death. Those questions of authenticity and appropriation has still not been resolved. All I can say for sure is that we really, really wanted to do these books. And we did them. And people seem to like them. Some people really, really like them.