The weary tone isn't due to overwork, just frustration. I'm pottering around doing little bits of filler that probably won't be used but which I need to have to hand just in case one of the features doesn't turn up. I had just such a situation last month where some last minute changes had to be made to the contents and I thought I'd spend some time making sure that there wouldn't be a hole this time around.
Sensible as that sounds, it's also the source of the frustration: I know that it's very unlikely that what I'm working on will ever see the light of day. We theme each section of each issue, so what I'm writing now will have no relevance to next issue's topic... so I can't just bump the material to next month. I have to scrap it entirely. Last month it was around 6,000 words, although quite a lot of that we were able to put online. This month it's mostly product filler which isn't much use for the website.
So I'm feeling a little frustrated as I'm finding there's precious little time at the moment to do any other writing. I've started doing some of the work I need to about British reprints of American magazines and American magazine imports and the first little bit should appear on Bear Alley next week, but the going is slow and it's not going to get any faster for a couple of months at least as next month's Hotel Business is a show issue with more pages and the one after that has a shorter deadline as we try to pull a little ahead before Christmas wrecks everybody's deadlines (I know... it seems like a long way to go, but in magazine terms it's only a few issues).
This week's random scans... as I'm thinking of those old "mushroom jungle" paperbacks at the moment, I thought I'd find some good girl art covers and found the following amongst the output of Hamilton & Co. They produced a slew of gangster novels in 1950-51 that, in a lot of cases, have yet to be credited to their real authors. I've never had a chance to do any kind of style analysis on the books as they're so scarce. Another project for another day.
Three of these are unsigned but I've seen them credited to John Pollack. I have to confess that I'm not 100% certain that's the case. I can't see any reason he wouldn't sign them if they were his. The artist is very familiar—I'm sure it's the same guy who painted covers for Edwin Self. Compare it to the Pete Costello novel at the top of the column... it's surely the same artist.
The cover for Faust of the FBI I'm really not sure about.
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