Mark wrote:
> And would there be a
> Hard Case Crime series,
> with its covers sharing
> the aesthetic of the
> Pulp Fiction poster,
> without Tarantino?
> (Would there Charles?)
Oh, yeah.
I don't hate Tarantino and I don't love Tarantino -- but I
can tell you with absolute certainty that Hard Case Crime
would exist, and would look exactly the way it does,
regardless of whether "Pulp Fiction" and its poster had ever
existed. Max and I were inspired by decades of reading books
that pre-date "Pulp Fiction," and neither of us was
particularly moved or inspired by the movie. I'm not saying
there's nothing in it I enjoyed, but it really didn't excite
me much -
- and its self-aware quoting of old tropes is exactly the
sort of bracketing behavior we bent over backwards to avoid
when designing our look.
The "Pulp Fiction" poster knows it's a pastiche of old styles
and revels in it -- it's exaggerated for comic effect and
filled with deliberate, explicit fakery, attempting to win a
knowing wink and nudge from the aficionado who knows what
it's quoting. It doesn't look like an actual movie poster
from the pulp era, or for that matter like an actual pulp
magazine cover -- it looks like the work of a modern designer
who is announcing his love for the pulp era.
For instance, note the fake 'distressing' of the 'paper' on
the right side of the image. Real pulps were not published
pre-distressed, like blue jeans are today; only we, today,
collecting ill-preserved pulps from 50+ years ago, see the
distressed state as normal and characteristic of pulp
fiction. Pulps in the day looked as new and fresh as the
latest copy of People magazine does to us -- worse paper,
sure, but not afflicted with decades of rot and decay.
Similarly, note the phony "10 cents" icon on the poster -- to
state the obvious, the movie isn't *actually* selling
anything for 10 cents, so this price symbol is there purely
as a joke, a gag, an inducement to nostalgia and an element
of whimsy. The old pulps didn't have anything on them that
played that sort of role. They showed their price -- their
actual price -- for informative reasons: so the person
picking an issue up would know how much to pay and the
newsstand owner would know how much to charge. That's very
different.
I'm not knocking the poster -- it's a fun image -- but in
these ways it's diametrically opposed to what we set out to
do with our books. We decided from the start that there would
be no jokes or gags on our covers -- we'd do pulp, but we'd
do it completely straight, our goal being to reproduce the
thing itself, not to produce a post-modern appreciation of
the thing. We wanted to publish books that looked as though
they could actually have been published back in the day --
not books that could only have been published in our modern
age of irony and camp and pastiche. And the highest praise
we've gotten has come from people like Mickey Spillane and
Donald Hamilton and Lawrence Block, who were actually around
in the day, when they've said things like, "If you'd shown me
that cover and told me it was a 1958 book, I'd have believed
you."
I can't say whether our books would have gotten the attention
they have if the audience hadn't been primed by Tarantino
(although an entire decade passed between the release of
"Pulp Fiction" and the publication of our first titles), but
I can say the books would have looked and read the way they
do regardless...
--Charles
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 06 Jul 2007 EDT