Dell Mapbacks^69Paperback cover art was at its high—or low, depending
on your point of view—from the 1940 s to early 1950 s
when a dozen or so New York–based reprint publishers
were in fierce competition. Of all of them the Dell Book
“look” was the most distinctive. Dell’s innovation was the
colorful locator maps that positioned each book in the
city, street, house, even room in which the plot developed.
The series was referred to as Mapbacks, and for little less
than a decade, before the maps were replaced with
conventional blurbs, they were among the most popular
line of mysteries, thrillers, and romances on the market.
The Dell Publishing Company was founded as a
pulp house in 1922 by George Delacorte, Jr., a twenty-
eight-year-old who built an amazingly profitable business
by publishing pulps, mass market magazines, and comic
books. Delacorte was an astute observer of popular trends.
Noting the success of Pocket Books he decided to start
Dell Books around 1941. By 1943 the first editions were
released. To limit his liability and ensure efficient
production, he entered into a partnership with Western
Printing and Lithographing Company of Racine, Illinois,
one of America’s largest commercial printers, whose staff
selected titles, created art, and printed Dell Books while
Delacorte distributed them.
Dell Books competed successfully because their
covers—initially promoting crime stories by Ellery
Queen, Rex Stout, Michael Shyne, and Brett Halliday,
among others—had sexual allure. Although many of the wartime
paperbacks used romantic realism to present seductive scenes, Dell used
surrealism to suggest racy content. Sex was used, disavowed, and then used
again as a marketing tool. The ebb and flow of sexual imagery was
nevertheless arbitrary. Rather than using market surveys, the publishers
decided on their own about how much was too much. To transcend the
saucy and hard-boiled pulp aesthetic perpetuated in Delacorte’s magazine
division, Dell’s Racine-based art director, William Strohmer, and his
assistant, George Frederiksen (who also painted a number of the covers),