George W. Bush Spotted on a Pulp Fiction Cover

Nicolas Cage isn’t the only one to pop up unexpectedly on book covers (both a Serbian textbook and a children’s history book).

During a recent browse through the huge cover archives at the blog Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books, I spotted a disturbingly familiar face on the cover of Charles Willeford’s Honey Gal: George W. Bush.

Honey Gal and Dubya. The sheep's in the meadow and the cow's in the corn, no doubt.

I don’t normally recoil when I see W’s visage, but when he (or his doppelganger) is sprawled under a haystack grasping confusedly at a busty barefoot vixen, I get caught off guard.

There’s no record of young Bush doing any modeling for pulp mystery paperback cover artists in his pre-prez days, but I can definitely hear him uttering the expression “honey gal.”

"Mr. Willeford, I'm ready for my close-up." (Photo via mywesttexas.com)

For those who don’t know Charles Willeford’s work, don’t be too put off by the sensational packaging. He’s actually quite readable (though I haven’t read Honey Gal.)

Both The Pick-Up and The Woman Chaser are fine examples of pulp mystery. The latter was made into an odd (though worth watching) little film of the same name with the also-odd-but-worth-watching Patrick Warburton, whom you might remember as TV’s real-life version of The Tick.

Spotted any famous doubles on book jackets? Let me know. Book Dirt is poised to become the repository for celebrity book cover sightings.