Vintage Pulp Fiction covers from Canada 1940 - 1952

Part of huge pulp fiction site called Collections Canada.

Click on each image to see the true color. For some reason they thumbnails looked washed out.

Quote: Eveyone is a genius at least once a year. A real genius has his original ideas closer together. - George C.Lichtenberg.

Art by Alphonse Mucha part of the Slavic Epic series.

Vintage Illustrator : Coby Whitmore

Coby Whitmore (1913- 1988)

In my opinion Coby Whitmore is hands down one of the best painters of very sexy all american 1950's women during this "New School" illustration period. In an effort to remain fresh he explored "unfinished" graphic shapes. Large areas have been minimized or eliminated in favour of letting background and foreground blend together in an interesting arrangement leaving minimal hints of a scene while other illustrators were painting and filling everything in a traditional manner.

During the late 40's and well into the late 50's, hardly an issue of Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, went by without story and/or advertising art by Whitmore.

Sadly, for many of these old school legends, there are no direct sites showcasing their contributions to the world of art except for fan sites like Todays Inspiration keeping their name alive. I will be posting a part 2 of Coby's work at a later time.

Vintage Femme Fatale Artist : Robert A. Maguire

Renowned illustrator/painter Robert A. Maguire created gorgeous cover images for more than a thousand books and worked for virtually every mainstream publisher in the U.S. He is best known for his incomparably sexy "femme fatale" images for pulp paperbacks in the 1950s and 1960s. Check out the new book "Dames, Dolls, and Gun Molls". Support the unsung art heros of days gone by.

Modern Pinup Artist: Alberto Ruiz

Alberto Ruiz is an artist from New York City. His books can be found HERE,

VIntage Pin-up Artist Master : Art Frahm

Art Frahm (1907-1981)

Art Frahm, a Chicago area artist whose commercial art ranged from magazine cover illustration to zany "hobo" calendar paintings, excelled in (and perhaps created) the "ladies in distress" series for the Joseph C. Hoover & Sons calendar company, in which a lovely girl is literally caught with her panties down, her lacy undies slipping to her ankles while she's in the process of bowling, walking the dog or changing a tire. Frahm was commercially successful. His falling-panties paintings are still considered too camp to be art, and too juvenile to be erotica However this genre (which Frahm seems to have created) was in demand in the 1950s, and was later imitated by some other pin-up artists.