Mondo Lizzie Borden

Back in June, I blogged about a not too pretty Lizzie newspaper illustration that seemed to age her for us, making her, well, rather unattractive.

I have since found a magazine illustration from PIC Magazine from 1938 that attempts to do the opposite: make Lizzie sexy. They added makeup, I guess, a little lipstick, and sort of updated her for the 30s. It almost doesn’t look like her anymore.

This image begs the question, however: did Lizzie Borden wear makeup?

The late poetess Ruth Whitman published a collection of poetry in 1973 and titled it The Passion of Lizzie Borden. It is a very nice book and since Lizzie is in the title, and one of the longer poems in the book is about Borden, it is a fine addition to any Lizzie Borden collection.

There is one on eBay right now that has a starting bid of only 1 cent. Cool, huh? Well, not so fast amigo. Look at that shipping fee: $5.00 for MEDIA MAIL, which would actually cost the seller under a buck for this slim volume. So here we have the classic snarley auction tactic: sell the item for cheap and jack up the shipping to make up the difference in item price. Please don’t fall for this type of disreputable behavior. You can grab this title on Abebook.com for under 5 dollars and shipping is a reasonable $3.50. I use Abebooks.com all the time and the book arrives very quickly and I have always (knock on wood) been happy with the condition matching the book’s description in the listing. On eBay, on the other hand, I have more than a few times been disappointed with the book’s wear. In once case, the seller even misread the jacket and sold the book as a Lizzie connected item when it wasn’t.

Thanks to Auds for this link—it is a good one. And it is directly related to Lizzie Borden. In fact, our fair lady of Fall River figures prominently in the story. I suggest you scurry on over there and read it. Now, please. You’ll thank me, and Auds, later.

Fake Lizzie photo by Harry Widdows.

A crime writer in Toronto is retiring after 34 years on the beat. His name is Max Haines. He is the author of over 2,500 articles and 27 books! Some of the titles include: True Crime Stories, Doctors Who Kill, Murders Strange But True, Bothersome Bodies, Murder Most Foul, Crime Flashback, and others. I can’t say I have heard of him, but he seems like the Ann Rule of Canada, writing true crime collections for mass consumption.

There is an article about his very interesting career in the Toronto Sun titled “After 34 years of columns and 27 books, ‘Mr. Murder’ Max Haines has decided it’s time to stop killing himself”—pretty good hook, wouldn’t you say?

What’s this got to do with Lizzie Borden, you ask? Well, according to the article, the very first piece that Mr. Haines wrote was on Lizzie! I think I’ll have to read some of his work now that I found out about him!