This summer I’ve been attracted to the detective/mystery genre, partly to read but mostly to look at. Collecting illustrated covers by artists working in melodramatic surreal styles has been one of my many diversions. The book Jackets Required, which I co-authored with Seymour Chwast (and which is now long out of print), focused exclusively on hardcover jackets. In other words, not paperbacks—so I never had an opportunity to write about the surreal mystery style, which other writers, archivists and collectors have since covered (no pun intended).
Until this weekend, I had dozens of vintage 1930s–’50s paperbacks boxed up in a closet that remained untouched, and indeed forgotten. When I opened it as part of a plan to clean out my storage bins, I found many gems, including three covers that grabbed my eye and fit my genre lust to a T. I also noticed the initials “HLH” on two of them, and a lone “H” on the third. Who was it? There was no other artistic attribution, so I did some detective work of my own—and solved the mystery rather quickly.
A quick Google search revealed that the publisher Popular Library was founded in 1942 as a detective story reprint company, but soon expanded into other genres. Twenty years later, the company went public with a stock offering, and in 1967 was sold to another publisher. But most importantly, for me, Popular Library’s first 100 covers were all created by the same artists, H. Lawrence Hoffman and Sol Immerman. The art eventually became more eye-catching and vivid with the addition of illustrators Rudolph Belarski, Earle K. Bergey and Rafael DeSoto … none of whom I had heard of, though I’m certain I’ve seen their work.
The three books shown here are by Hoffman (1911–1977), a designer, illustrator, calligrapher and painter based in New York. He was prolific, with 25 publishing house clients, including Knopf, Pocket Books, Popular Library, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster and Random House. He illustrated and/or designed over 600 book covers.
Hoffman graduated Rhode Island School of Design in 1934 and received what was at the time a rare post-graduate degree in commercial art. He moved to New York City, worked as an art director at the A.M. Sneider Advertising Company (1938–1941) and at Immerman Art Studios (1941–?). He freelanced for the remainder of his career and taught illustration and lettering at The Cooper Union and C.W. Post University.
Hoffman launched his career doing drawings for the pulp-genre Thrilling Mystery Magazine, a Ned Pines publication. Beginning around 1943, he began illustrating almost all of the first 100 paperback covers for Popular Library, also founded by Pines.
In 1947, Hoffman designed the jacket and interior illustrations for The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Modern English Prose Translation by R.M. Lumiansky, published by Simon & Schuster. The book was later selected as one of the 50 best books of the year by AIGA.
(Author’s note: After scanning the first page of Google results, I went to the next and found this article from 2015. When for well over a decade you do five posts a week, memory, they say, is the first thing to go …)
