Earle K. Bergey was an American artist and illustrator who painted cover art for thousands of pulp fiction magazines and paperback books. One of the most prolific pulp fiction artists of the 20th century, Bergey is recognized for creating, at the height of his career in 1948, the iconic cover of Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) for Popular Library.
August 1930 cover of the pulp magazine, Amazing Detective Tales, signed by Earle K. Bergey. A landmark image from the early stages of Bergey's career, this is the only cover the artist produced for a Hugo Gernsback publication.
Marking the start of Bergey's highly influential run as an American paperback illustrator, this bombshell painting made the mass paperback cover of Anita Loos's blockbuster, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (published as Popular Library #221).
Earle K. Bergey's cover painting for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, circa 1948.
Pulp magazines were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 until around 1955. The term "pulp" derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages; it was 7 inches (18 cm) wide by 10 inches (25 cm) high, and 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century.
Cover of the pulp magazine Spicy Detective Stories vol. 2, #6 (April 1935) featuring "Bullet from Nowhere" by Robert Leslie Bellem
November 1927 issue of Black Mask, featuring The Continental Op
Cover of the pulp magazine Dime Mystery Book Magazine, January 1933
Image: Detective Book Magazine 002
