Tales of Horror

New York: Pocket Books, Inc. (A Pocket Book Special). Good. (c.1965). First Edition. Softcover. [covers are edgeworn, the spine has been covered/reinforced by a strip of clear tape, and the previous owner's name plus date & place of purchase is written in ink at the top of the title page]. (pen and ink drawings) Very uncommon anthology of horror stories -- short-short stories, in fact, since each is just a single page in length (printed in two-column format, evocative of pulp-magazine formatting). There are 49 stories in this 54-page book, a paperback original which measures 6" x 9" (hence a Pocket Book "Special," larger than that publisher's typical mass-market product), interspersed with occasional full-page illustrations. The author (1925-2011) was quite prolific, not only in output but in pseudonymitry (if that's a word): according to encyclopedia-dot-com, he also wrote under the noms de plume J.D. Hardin, Zachary Hawkes, T.G. Horne, Jake Logan, E.B. Majors, Barbara Riefe, and Ann Cameron, with most of his work falling into the suspense, historical romance, and western genres. (He also wrote extensively for comic books, notably "The Adventures of Jerry Lewis" and "Hogan's Heroes," and contributed science fiction stories to Boys' Life magazine.) Horror fiction was apparently something of an outlier for him, as this seems to have been his only published work in that vein. Of special note are the truly creepy illustrations (including the cover) by Irv Docktor, a well-known book and magazine illustrator, among whose better-known works were the dust jacket illustrations for Patricia Highsmith's "Strangers on a Train," Leigh Brackett's "The Long Tomorrow," and Sylvia Tate's "The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown," along with numerous paperback covers for mass market paperbacks of the 1950s and 1960s, including multiple titles by Erskine Caldwell and Robert A. Heinlein. .