The “X” Factor

The X from the bookÂ Warrant for X (1945; first pub. 1938 as The Nursemaid Who Disappeared), by Philip MacDonald

I started collecting Cold War-era (i.e., from the end of WWII through détente) “X” paperbacks when I was 12 years old. From the pulp fiction pile in my grandfather’s summer house in Maine, I smuggled home a 1945 Pocket Book edition of Philip MacDonald’s Warrant for X. I didn’t want to read it; I was obsessed with the free-standing “X” on its cover: two swipes of red paint topped by two narrower swipes of white. Thus rendered, the letterform struck me — though not in these terms — as the quintessential signifier of all things mysterious and dangerous, forbidden and sexy.

PLAY SLIDESHOW

From the late Fifties through the Sixties, science fiction publishers seconded that emotion. Even as the free-standing letter “X” all but vanished from the titles of crime novels (why? all theories welcomed), it resurfaced in sci-fi novel titles, from Wilson Tucker’s Tomorrow Plus X (1957) through by Theodore Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X (1960), Andre Norton’s The X Factor (1965), and Ben Barzman’s Echo X (1968). Though I do have a couple of mysteries — and two romance novels — in my collection, the rest are science fiction.

I haven’t attempted to track down copies of every single Cold War-era “X” paperback, but my research indicates that there are a couple dozen of them out there — not counting novels with non-freestanding-“X” titles like The X-machine, Phenomena X, Force 97X, or Formula 29X (all of which happen to have been penned by the same author, using various pseudonyms). If I sound like an overly uptight purist, I hasten to note that I’m not too proud to collect novels whose titles were changed: e.g., Tomorrow Plus X was first published as Time Bomb, while Echo X was originally Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. I can’t afford to be that choosy: MacDonald’s Warrant for X, the catalyst for three decades of collecting “X” books, was first published in 1938 under the “X”-less title The Nursemaid Who Disappeared!

The following slideshow features fifteen of my favorite Cold War-era “X” paperbacks. For more information on these titles and their authors, and to view more titles in my ever-expanding “X” collection, check out the pulp fiction gallery I’ve created at the website HiLobrow.

Observed