Vintage Book Ads

Via the Paper Cuts blog at the New York Times (on hiatus until next week) comes this lovely collection of Book Ads: The Golden Age, 1962-73. These are some of my favorites.



June 27, 1968

Rex Reed was at the top of his game in the summer of 1968, when this ad for a collection of his show-business essays and profiles appeared in the daily Times. Reed was a celebrated New Journalist, the next Tom Wolfe. But it still made commercial sense to drag Jacqueline Susann into the mix. She was fresh from the success of “Valley of the Dolls” (1966), which sold more than 19 million copies. Reed's collection was reviewed in the Book Review by Nora Ephron, who began her piece this way: “Rex Reed is a saucy, snoopy, bitchy man who sees with sharp eyes and writes with a mean pen and succeeds in making voyeurs of us all. If any of this sounds as if I don't like Rex Reed, let me correct that impression. I love Rex Reed.”

Oct. 27, 1968

“Hanoi” was the second of three books Mary McCarthy wrote about the Vietnam War — the others were “Vietnam” (1967) and “Medina” (1972). All three would later be gathered into one volume, “The Seventeenth Degree.” McCarthy's trip to Hanoi was not met with outrage, as Jane Fonda's would be four years later. But many critics chafed at her rosy portrait of North Vietnam. In Time magazine, a reviewer wrote that “Hanoi” suffered from “a Lincoln Steffens I-have-seen-the-future-and-it-works naïveté.”

See more in the slideshow.