turned to expressionistic art that used dramatic symbolism to suggest the
theme or plot. The leading staff artist, Gerald Gregg, had adopted various
Dali-esque conceits—fragmented body parts and floating objects—which
he rendered in airbrush. His distinctive symbolic style was enhanced by the
airbrush’s smooth, continuous tones and the artist’s preference for bright
colors.
A lot of the lettering in the 1940 s paperbacks resembled splash
panels of comic books. Dell’s lettering, exclusively hand drawn by Bernie
Salbreiter, owes more to movie titles.In Paperbacks, U.S.A.: A Graphic
History, 1939 – 1959 (Blue Dolphin Enterprises, 1981 ), Piet Schreuders writes
that in popular culture paperbacks fit somewhere between the comics and
B-movies: “American paperbacks have had a close relationship with the
Hollywood film... the film noir and the psychological thriller.” Gregg’s
cover art for Crime for a Lady, a back view of a tiny trench-coated man
whispering into an oversized woman’s ear, is a comic book cliché
reminiscent of B-movie posters from the 1930 s and 1940 s.
Dell’s covers were sometimes crude and often simple. The
simplicity of their imagery may have had something to do with the fact
that most Dell artists never read the manuscripts. They were given titles
and an oral summary of the contents, a process that was bound to result in
a reliance on clichés. Although the cover concepts were based on
summaries, the back covers, Dell’s exclusive “cartographic fantasies”
required a close reading to determine what part of the plot would be
depicted and then rendered (almost exclusively) by Dell’s in-house map-
maker, Ruth Belew. Dell used maps as a standard feature from 1943 to 1951.
They were based on the scene-of-the-crime diagrams found in tabloid
newspapers.
The style that distinguished Dell Books for less than a decade
ended around 1951 when the art department moved from Racine to New
York. Romantic realism was prevailing in illustration, especially for
magazines, and Dell’s New York art director, Walter Brooks, championed
the sexy realism of Robert Stanley, one of Dell’s leading realist artists. He
modernized the overall look by adopting sans-serif lettering and replacing
maps with blurbs. These changes did not hinder sales, but they ended a
special era in posterlike paperback art.
tuis.
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