Friday 7 August 2009

Fly-by-night


"...this kind of book, deliberately offered by some fly-by-night publisher in the hope of wringing a few dollars from the sex-starved, is a relatively new thing in Canadian publishing."

Allan Sangster, "The Winter of Time", The Canadian Forum, May 1950, pp. 45, 46.

The quote is from a review of The Winter of Time published in November 1949 by Export Publishing Enterprises Ltd. as number 85 in Export's News Stand Library Pocket Edition (NSL) imprint. The author was Raymond Holmes, a pseudonym for Raymond Souster, later one of Canada's best known poets. Export, who published 188 books betwen 1948 and 1951, was one of dozens of Canadian paperback publishers from the 1940s and early 50s that are largely forgotten today. The romance publisher Harlequin is the only survivor.

This blog will be looking at the books, the authors and the men and women who published these early paperbacks.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for this. I was aware of Souster's pulp novel, but had never seen the cover. I suspect the artist is the same person who did Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street. In fact, the girl depicted looks very much like that novel's Gisele Lepine - and the pink dress is most certainly hers.

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  2. Thanks for the comment. Yes it is the same artist. If you expand the picture you can see the initials "DR" in the window at far right. This is D. Rickard, the subject of my second post to the blog.

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