Ugly and Bizarre book covers

In honor of this phallo-rific paperback cover that Hang Fire Books proprietor William Smith recently stumbled upon, he has created an "Artists With Issues" tag for the "Ugly and Bizarre" category of his Pulp Fiction Cover Gallery.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Remocarpet

Those blade books are a treasure trove of bad covers. I have a later one called, “The Crystal Seas”, with a cover that implies the (nude male) protagonist is about to be violated by tentacles.
bjacques

He’s using the crowbar thingy to escape the Crap Dimension, while the cavewoman sets it on fire as a diversion. And isn’t that the dinosaur that savaged Newman in Jurassic Park?
Anonymous

Why is Chevy Chase holding a dildo spear crowbar?
Anonymous

I think in 5th or 6th grade I read a couple of those Blade books. Mainly I was interested in the sex parts, but I think the story was that a modern day man has a scientist friend who accidentally sends him to another dimension (creatively called Dimension X) where scantily clad women need his help in defending themselves from angry overlords. Or maybe the scantily clad women were the overlords and he’s taken prisoner and tortured by the high priestess. Or some variation of that kind of story. I hadn’t thought about that in forever. It seems there’s a gallery of Blade covers at http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/l/jeffrey-lord/
Anonymous

See also http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CoversAlwaysLie

and

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ContemptibleCover
Billy Blight

Ugly? I disagree. I’d get a poster print of that in a heartbeat. Put it in a nice frame above the mantel.
caldrax

i was always amused by this one for “seductive wager” when I worked at Barnes and Noble. The two words didn’t seem to go right together, at all. I guess the cover is just standard romance fare but the title is what does it for me:

http://img.infibeam.com/img/dcae3920/291/5/9780505525291.jpg
simonbarsinister

I read that ‘Blade’ book, and believe me the cover does a good job of foretelling what you will find inside.

It’s basically James Bond meets Conan meets Harlequin Romance with some explicit sex thrown in.
ProgHead777

Man, Tom Delay was ripped back in the day. Now I see just how much he’s let himself go. Sad.