La ventosa [Case of the Nervous Nude] (Vintage Italian hardcover edition)

Longanesi, 1960. Very Good. Gialli Probiti 86. Vintage Italian hardcover in dust jacket, translation of "Case of the Nervous Nude" (Fawcett, 1959). Digest-size hardcover in jacket, photographic cover featuring Barbara Nichols, reclining on concrete steips in black heels and lavender dress, bleach blonde curls, ruby red lips, and tan nylons. Nichols would star in the Spring Break flick "Where the Boys Are" (1960), and was a model for major publishing houses who specialized in "girlie" magazines of the 1950s. Some of her earliest appearances are vintage paperback and digest covers, great detective/true crime magazine covers of the 1960s, and in tiny ads for photo enlarging showing a young Barbara, perhaps an early test photo.Other Gialli editions credited models on the jacket flap, not so here. Giusto Vaglieri's "Gialli" imprint was one of Italy's finest, offering translations of (mostly) American crime fiction with winking cat face mascot, tiny man in clutched fist illustration on the rear panels, and lush, full-color pin-up jacket photos of Raquel Welch, Lili St. Cyr, June Wilkinson, and others. Very Good Plus in Very Good jacket, slight lean, light toning, jacket with several small chips and tears.