Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Hammett Mapback: The Return of the Continental Op (1947)


4 comments:

  1. Seems like I just heard the term mapback yesterday and here it is again. Uhm, maybe I heard it on your blog. Anyway, I've seen these but didn't know it was a regular feature of these books

    ReplyDelete
  2. Charles - Dell did an entire series of them, was famous for the books, or the books were famous. They are avidly collected. A day or three ago Golden Age had a whole slew of the covers. There is a book about them, now out of print, Putting Dell on the Map ( http://www.amazon.com/Putting-Dell-Map-Paperbacks-Contributions/dp/0313236674 ).

    ReplyDelete
  3. Evan - this is a good one, read it a year or two ago and enjoyed it a lot.

    ReplyDelete
  4. These Hammett mapbacks were my intro into the world of collectible paperbacks. At the time (early 80s, I think), these were the most accessible reprints of most of Hammett's short stories. The only other reprint sources were the earlier (and even scarcer) Spivak digests, and occasional old issues of EQMM.

    ReplyDelete