As you loyal readers already know Boxing Day comes around every month, in fact it now comes around twice a month because we have so much coming into the collections that need enclosures. We crank out the work on Boxing Day but we also get to stop ever so briefly to take a closer look at some of the materials.
My favorite from our most recent Boxing Day were numbers 1, 4 and 7 in the Black Samurai series by Marc Olden. I have never seen these books, but I love the cover art and the story summaries on the back covers. These were written in the 1970’s, and some were translated into films.
What really struck me were the cigarette ads inserted into the middle of the books. I wasn’t reading pulp fiction in the early 1970’s as I was too young to do so. I wonder, were cigarette ads put into a lot of pulp fiction titles? or was this a targeted advertising campaign? I’d be interested to know more if you know anything about this title, publisher or 1970’s pulp fiction in general.