The Mystery of Ruth Belew And the Dell Mapbacks

 The Mystery of Ruth Belew

And the Dell Mapbacks

 

As a kid in the 1940’s I was fascinated by the piles of paperback mysteries that sat around my grandmother’s cottage.  I poured over them in the flickering yellow light of the “coal-oil” (kerosene) lamp  while playing Hot Pretzels or The Pennsylvania Polka  on the crank-up Victrola.   I studied them carefully, but I wasn’t reading the stories.  Instead I was fascinated with the covers.  Specifically the back covers.  The mysteries  were 25¢ Dell paperbacks, those we know today as “mapbacks.”   

 

Over the years I have accumulated two dozen or so of these graphic design classics.  They were produced from 1943 to 1953.  They had a style all their own.  Dell Books was a venture of George Delacourte, a New York publisher, and Lloyd Smith of Western Printing and Lithography in Racine, Wisconsin.  (Much of this information comes from The Dell “Mapbacks” by Piet Schreuders, Uitgeverij Publishers, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 1997.)  Smith created the overall look and style of the new Dell line.  The (front) cover work was largely the distinctive airbrush style of Western’s in-house artist/graphic designer, Gerald B. Gregg.  Gregg seems to have liked painting hands…

 

But look at the backs.  Here is where we find the maps.  “Maps” broadly defined, from floor plans to oblique aerial views of architecture,  from city street maps to global views.  But who did the maps?  For a long time I didn’t know.  Then I found Schreuders’ book on-line and ordered it from the Netherlands.  The vast bulk of the maps were created by a Chicago graphic artist, Ruth Belew.  Unfortunately no one seems to know much more about her.  She drafted the maps and perspective views in black ink and the pre-press staff at Western in Racine added the color.  Here are some examples…

 While the bulk of the map backs were mysteries, there were romances, humor, science fiction, non-fiction, and more.  Our map examples above show both the cartographic and genre variety of mapbacks.  On the left is a mystery, Report for a Corpse.  There is a line map of Manhattan and an overhead view of the “love nest” where the “luscious dame” was murdered.  

 In the middle of our examples is P.G. Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters, with our old friends Bertie and Jeeves.  Here the “map” is an oblique aerial view of Totleigh Towers.  And then on the right is Queen of the Flat-Tops, a non-fiction “Dell War Book” published during World War II, with a map of early action in the Pacific Theater.

 Unfortunately I don’t know for sure if all of these maps were the product of Ruth Belew, although they probably were.  Notice how distinctly different Dell’s back cover style was from the air-brushed fronts.  Both are part of the classic mapback style.  That style has been copied, parodied, and quoted frequently over the years.  Here are some...

 Left and center are homages to the Dell back and front covers in advertising postcards from Powell’s bookstore in Portland.  I have an in-store guide to this cavernous “City of Books” that is a masterpiece of mapback inspired graphics.  On the right is my own adoptation for a party invitation where  I fondly adopted the Dell mapback, a cut-away overhead view of our own house for a party invitation.

 

Dell mapbacks may have been middlebrow entertainment, but they gave birth to some classic, if ephemeral graphic design.  I’m going to keep looking for information - and other art - from Ruth Belew.  Meanwhile she remains a mystery.