About the Mapback Index

The Dell Mapbacks

The Dell "mapbacks" were paperbacks published by Dell in the 1940s and 1950s. They were primarily genre books—mostly mysteries, Westerns, and romances. Many of them were written by authors who were famous at the time; many by authors who became famous later; and quite a few were written by authors who never published another book. The front covers were striking, and the back covers featured stylized maps of locales that featured in the books: sometimes whole towns (real or fictional), sometimes neighborhoods, often apartments or other buildings that were the scene of a crime.

A note about the maps

Many of the maps are uncredited. Of the few that are, most are credited to artist Ruth Belew.

The Index

The Mapback Index started out as an Access database, around 2001 or so. I've been collecting mapbacks since I was 13—a friend lent me a copy of Faith Baldwin's The Incredible Year, and I was fascinated by the map on the back and the "cast of characters" in the front (not so much by the cover, which in my opinion is not very impressive...sorry, S. B. Jones!). About the time I got my driver's license, I discovered a thrift store in my hometown that had a spinner rack full of pulp novels, and I realized that the map wasn't just a one-time thing: there were LOTS of mapbacks. I was in pulp heaven. I bought as many as they had (for a dime each!), and thus my collection was born.

In 2001 I was working at the University at Buffalo, which has a fabulous collection of pulp paperbacks. The other thing it has is a copy of Dell Paperbacks, 1942 to Mid-1962 and Putting Dell on the Map, by William H. Lyles, who had worked at Dell. Once I discovered those books I knew I wanted to catalog my mapbacks. After about a year of obsessive eBay searching, I finally obtained my own copies of Mr. Lyles' work, and began entering my own books in a database. I was a web developer at the time, and I had some idea that I would like to put it online, but didn't really pursue it until about a year ago, when I was looking through some old files and found a SQL dump of my Access database...right before I went to a comics and vintage show and acquired some more mapbacks. It just snowballed from there, as these things do.

The site is free to use and will never have ads. It's sheerly a labor of love. The images are small and low-res on purpose; they are intended to be fun to look at and to be inspired by, and to be a reference for collectors.

Features (current and future)

Here are the things I'm still working on:

August 2024

• Fixing the search function, which apparently broke at some point (probably when I changed web hosts and upgraded to a newer version of PHP)
• Fixing the list style on this page
• Adding a data entry admin panel, so that I can see thumbnails of the images and enter better alt text for them
• Setting up a Mastodon bot to show random covers every few hours (maybe)
• Figuring out if there's a use for either the Open Library or LOC API on this site

January 2022

As of January 2022, the database is nearly complete. I've entered more than 400almost 500 of the roughly 580 books that have maps on the back cover and their authors. I'm scanning the covers of my own books first, but I'm also seeking permission from others who have posted scans to other sites for their images so I can convert them to the same size and scale as my own. Here are the things you can do currently:

• Look up books by title, author, cover artist, Dell number, genre, or copyright date in the complete index.
• Get information about the authors and artists from their own pages.

June 2018

• JUNE 2018 PRIORITY:Adding a search bar so people can search by author, title, etc. DONE! The search form broke at some point and I didn't notice. It's down for repairs now (July 2024).
• Getting more cover scans! Including my own.
• Completing the data entry.
• Making the site more responsive and accessible.
• Adding index pages for the authors and cover artists DONE!
• Reporting on my database schema, like the good folks over at ISFDB, whose schema helped me figure out what to do about pseudonyms.
• Making a printable checklist you can take along with you when you go out looking for books, or save it to Google Docs if you don't want to print it out (it's pretty long).
• Adding eBay listings to the book pages. DONE!
• Disabling the eBay listings, since the API apparently is no longer in use. DONE, unfortunately. I liked the eBay listings.
• Licensing the Mapback Index with a Creative Commons license.
• Notifying the OER repositories that it has a CC license.

A Note About the Tech

This site is in part a way for me to keep one foot in the web development world. Since the time I was a full-time web developer, everybody has started using frameworks. I... just don't want to. Originally I had a long explanation of that in this space, but honestly, I just like plain-vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I like relational databases and SQL. I still enter most of the data in SQL (although I rarely do it on the command line anymore; I use the query form in phpMyAdmin now). I'm working, very slowly, on a data entry form so that I can see the cover images and then enter descriptions for the alt text. Maybe I should have done this in Wordpress, or Drupal, or even Omeka, but then I would not have had the fun I've had with it for all these years. Oh well.

Resources and Links