While looking through my folders for something suitable to post on a Friday the 13th, I dug out these three covers for cleaning up. Pedigree Books were active in the late 1950s and early 1960s, run by Edwin Self who had been active during the gangster boom a few years earlier as both an editor and publisher. He earned himself a little jail time when it was decided that some of his books were obscene—which they certainly were not, in my opinion. You can find out more about the case in my essay "In Self Defence" which appears in
Mean Streetmaps and takes a closer look at one of the books that was put on trial.
Pedigree had a fantastic line-up of titles, many of them bordering on what modern collectors call sleaze due to the concentration on juvenile delinquency (e.g. reprints of Hal Ellson) and non-fiction about murder, torture and prostitution. And satanism, as the trio below shows.
The real surprise here is a cover by none other than Ron Turner. Unfortunately, this is the best scan I have been able to locate. It cleaned up reasonably well, but if anyone has a copy of the original and a scanner, I wouldn't mind a high res scan.
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