"It does help the reader relate events to setting, and does so accurately and with a sense of atmosphere. As a combination of decoration and usefulness, it's probably the best of the lot."- Jack Iams (on the "mapback" edition of his Girl Meets Body, 1947)
I unearthed a spiral-bound book during a
minor restructuring of my shelves and it's one of those books I intended to
read, but lingered on the pile before being shelved. Well, Piet Schreuders' The Dell Mapbacks (1997) is actually more of a diary posing as a booklet than
an actual book. It goes in a few short chapters, fourteen pages in total, over
the history of the immense popular and highly collectible Dell Mapbacks –
distinguished by their airbrushed cover art and crime maps on the back covers.
Schreuders is a graphic designer by trade
and admirably adopted the Dell Mapback style-and trademarks for the compilation
of The Dell Mapbacks, which is plainly a labor of love of a collector/fan.
The book even opens with What This Book is About ("a series of
highly collectible BOOKS published between 1943 and 1953"), Wouldn't
You Like to Know ("who murdered the DELL historian,
William H. Lyles?") and Persons this Book is about – followed
by a dramatis personae and a List of Exciting Illustrations.
Dell Books was brought into being in the
middle of World War II when Dell founder, George T. Delacorte, Jr., needed
paper to print books and Lloyd Smith of Western Printing & Lithographing
wanted printing work, but the most eye-brow raising from this chapter was how
these beloved collectibles were abridged or even censored! "Some books were
abridged drastically so as to fit Dell's page requirements" and "although
the front cover blurb... suggested that the books were complete, they rarely
were." And worse: "one
compositor, Ralph MacNichol, spiced the house style with his editorial judgment
by removing words like Christ, Jesus, and Goddamn." It's good to see one
moral arbiter had to foresight to see the possibility of the nazi's eventually
opening a North-American branch of the Kultuurkamer and brushed up on
his résumé just in case. Hey, I had to raise that petty censorship with a
Godwin.
The following chapter concerns the
art-department of Dell Books and in particular the work of Gerald B. Gregg, who
painted the covers of 212 novels and drew a couple of back covers, and praised
for "extraordinary skill with the airbrush which made the Dell covers of the
1940s unique in appearance." True to the nature of a detective story, Gregg
was "resorting to the tricks of the time to get the effects" such as pasting a
paper doily onto the bottom of a painting (i.e. cover of Fanny Heaslip Lea’s Half
Angel, 1946; a romance novel). The Dell Mapbacks reproduces fourteen of
Gregg's covers in this book. Another artist mentioned in this chapter is Robert Stanley, who used himself as a model for characters such as Sam Spade, Mike
Shayne, Hercule Poirot and Zorro!
However, it's the crime map on the back
covers that stands out as the standard feature among these Dell Book trademarks,
and the feature that keeps drawing-in readers, but they probably cost them the
most work – from editors and volunteers to map specialists. Something worth
mentioning is that Schreuders included two of his own (fake) mapbacks, but they
are truly astonishing pieces of art! I especially liked the map showing the
location, Haags Gemeentemuseum, of the first international paperback art
exhibition in The Hague, in February, 1981. The chapter also notes Dell historian, Lyles, discovered the identity of a prolific crime back artist, Ruth Belew, who drew 150 (or so) in the series.
The historic overview of Dell Books ends
on a sad note with the story of William H. Lyles, writer and researcher, who
wrote a biography of the Dell Books entitled Putting Dell on the Map
(1983) and it's reputedly a meticulous analysis of the stories in comparison
with the artwork/crime maps. Unfortunately, there were personal and financial
problems for Lyles (resulting in selling-off his entire and complete collection
of mapbacks), which ended with him snapping and committing suicide after
shooting (and wounding) his then girlfriend in July of 1996. The remainder of The
Dell Mapbacks consists of a diary for 1998 and interspersed with
replications of front-and back covers of various Dell publications – from mystery
and romance to western and science fiction. Flipped through the book again,
but it's hard to pick a favorite. Even the simple map of the European
Theater of Operation, from the back cover of Eisenhower Was My Boss
(1948; Kay Summersby), makes me want to seek out that book.
Long story short, The Dell Mapbacks
is an interesting curio and as collectible for Mapback collectors as the
original books. And Schreuders included a list of essential reading, if your
interest has been piqued on this niche subject.
