Canadian Paperbacks - Other Editions Part V

In an earlier post I showed some of the non-Canadian paperback editions of Mickey Spillane's very popular first book I, the Jury. Once again the very first paperback edition from Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Canada leads followed by the first American, British and French. Then four later editions, two British and two American.

White Circle CD384 - 1948

NAL Signet 699 1st printing - December 1948

Arthur Barker 1st printing - 1952

 Presses de la Cité Coll. Un Mystère n° 2 - 1950

NAL Signet 699 26th printing - December 1952

NAL Signet AE3543 77th printing - nd [after 1982]

Arthur Barker Dragon 31 - 1959

Corgi 9th printing - 1970

Va Va Voom

"I looked him over real slow like I was trying to find a spot in the garbage pail for the latest load and said, 'Hello, stupid.'"

A favourite line of mine from Mickey Spillane's seventh Mike Hammer novel, Kiss Me, Deadly (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1952).

The book was the basis for by far the best of the Hammer films, Kiss Me Deadly (1955) [no ","], directed by Robert Aldrich. Anyone who has seen the movie will recognize the scene on the cover of the British first edition - the dame in the trench coat (Cloris Leachman in the movie) caught in the headlights. After this scene and the next few little of the book remains in the film.

Unlike Spillane's first book, I, the Jury, Kiss Me, Deadly did not have a unique Canadian edition. After the success of the American paperback reprint of I, the Jury, New American Library published Canadian editions identical, except for price, to their American books. The 1st and 37th NAL American printings are below. Art by James Meese and Barye Phillips respectively.

London: Arthur Barker, 1953

New American Library 1000 - April 1953

New American Library 1000 back

New American Library AE6593 - [1989]

New American Library AE6593 back

Two Canadian Pirates

Here are two Canadian paperbacks from the late 1940s or early 1950s that are pirated versions of American books.

The first Canadian pirate is God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell - stolen from the New American Library (NAL) Signet edition first published by NAL's predecessor Penguin US. The pirate is published by Anglo-American Publishing Co. Limited. There is no publisher address but the book states "Printed in Canada 1948". All the publisher identifiers on the original cover have been removed but, except for the title and copyright pages, the book is a duplicate of the NAL edition.

The second pirate is not so obvious. A new title and cover help disguise White Heat by Joan Sherman (pseudonym of Peggy Gaddis). The legitimate edition was published as Lulie (Handi-Book Romance 91) by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. of New York in 1949. This edition has four pages with title, copyright etc. and then text from page 5 to 122. The pirated edition, referred to as Bizarre Books No. 1, has no preliminary pages and starts with the same page 5 and ends on the same page 122. The title/copyright/publisher information is on the inside front cover where there is a line that says "Restyled into Another Sell-Out Edition" for the publisher, The Trade-Mark Pocket Library at 28-20 Wellington St. West in Toronto. Note the two quotes from non-existent newspapers/magazines - "Fleshpots and Sinners..." from the London Literary Chronicle (!). The cover is in the running for the "ugliest Canadian paperback cover of all time".

The pirate's dimensions are smaller because the pages of the Quinn edition have been trimmed. Clearly the cover and first four pages of the Quinn edition have been removed, the pages trimmed and the White Heat cover glued on.

White Circle and Spillane - Tough, Torrid, Terrific!

Between 1942 and 1952 Wm. Collins Canada published 459 of their White Circle paperback imprint. Some of these were new editions of books published earlier in the series leaving 429 published titles. By far the best known of the 429 White Circles is CD384, Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury. The artist is unknown.

This is the first paperback edition of Spillane's first and best known book, published in 1947. The White Circle edition was published in late 1948 and precedes the American edition, New American Library's (NAL) Signet #699, by a couple of months. The NAL edition is famous for the impact it had on publishing. The hardcover had sold a few thousands of copies but the NAL paperback sold 2,000,000 in two years. NAL then went on to publish in paperback the rest of Spillane's novels in the early fifties with 17,000,000 in total sold by 1953 (figures from Kenneth Davis, Two-Bit Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), p. 180.) These figures shocked the cultural critics of the day and amazed the publishers.

"But the law couldn't break an arm, or shove his teeth in with the muzzle of a gun to remind him that he wasn't fooling. Mike could - and did. Among the suspects were a former gangster gone society, a peculiar kid he was putting through college, a beautiful and sexy psychiatrist, a subtle nymphomaniac with a normal twin sister, a cured drug addict, and a likable moron who raised bees."

The White Circle was reprinted in 1949 and therefore sold a bit better than most of the titles. Still sales were likely no more than 40,000. It was the only Spillane White Circle. The Canadian market thereafter was covered by Canadian editions of NAL Signets. The sixth edition from the late 1950s is below. Note that sales are now 28,000,000. The artist is Barye Phillips.