Judging a book by its cover: National Cowboy Museum exhibit makes the cover the story with 'The Artistry of the Western Paperback'

Amid the showy depictions of rearing horses, racing stagecoaches and deadly duels, a strange similarity becomes apparent between the solemn hero framed by revolvers on the cover of “Valley of Guns” and the frantic man clenching a bullet between his teeth on the front of “Bandit Trail.”

“With Robert Stanley, I liked the way he did his covers. And a lot of it was because they were him — he used himself and his wife as his models for every cover he made,” said Karen Spilman, the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum's librarian.

“I was fascinated by the fact that for every single one of these covers, a painting was created.”

Ten years into cataloging a vast collection of Western paperback novels, Spilman is paying homage to the illustrators who crafted covers that could match florid titles like “Skeleton Trail,” “Death Rides the Night” and “Deadline at Durango.”