Comic Cuts - 17 July 2015

On Monday I hopped back on the Hotel Business treadmill to catch up on e-mails that had built up last week. About 650 of them. After lining up a number of stories on the paper's website on Monday morning, I cracked on with the mail and wiped out around 200 before the day's end. Lots of them are irrelevant—news from abroad, news that's going to be way out of date by the time the next issue appears in mid-August, or just plain bugger all to do with us.

Despite new mail arriving at a rate of 50-80 press-releases a day, on Tuesday I managed to get the mail levels down to around 120 by close of play. Wednesday was a nice change of pace: I'd built up a few stories supplied by our ad department and spent a good part of the day chopping them down to a reasonable and readable few paragraphs. By day's end I'd also cracked on with the mail and had kept it down to about 130 unread.

And that brings us up to date as I'm writing this on Thursday afternoon, having spent this morning working on the last bit of the current crop of Caught In The Act research, which I'll post either over the weekend or during next week. It concerns another court case and is the last of this first batch of research notes for the book; we've now covered all the cases from that period (1938-42) that resulted in jail sentences of over 18 months.

There may now be a little pause while I get into the next bit of research: the distribution of US pulps and magazines in the UK.

When I'm not in front of the computer, I've been keeping tabs on our latest crop of tomatoes. We have three plants this year, all of which are blooming. In fact, we've started picking this year's crop, having plucked three black cherry tomatoes from the plant yesterday. Not only that, but we've also had one huge cucumber—gorgeously crisp and perfect in a sandwich with some nice strong cheese we had sitting in the fridge.

Judging by the clusters of flowers on these plants we can expect plenty more tomatoes, cucumbers and beans—I'm especially looking forward to the first of the Marmande tomatoes, which are weirdly segmented. One of them looks almost ready for picking.


Today's random scans are a trio of saucy novels from the 1930s, in keeping with the research I've been doing for the book. Gramol published over 100 of these novels in 1928-30 but they're so scarce these days that I've never been able to compile a complete catalogue of the authors—I think I'm ten shy at the moment, so if anyone has any of these, perhaps they'll know the names of the authors of Sweet Surrender, It Happened In Paris, The Easiest Way, A Daughter of Joy, Passion Seekers, Satan's Temptress, Prairie Passion, Professional Love, The Call of Youth and The Garden of Passion.

If anyone has any of these old Gramol titles of any description [crime, romance, westerns, etc.] I'd love some scans; even a decent photograph might be of use as it's an area I'm poor in when it comes to copies and cover scans. Unbelievable to think that Gramol published over 660 books, of which I have maybe half a dozen!