First Love Illustrated #17

A charged moment of romantic tension takes center stage on Al Avison's cover for this 1952 Harvey romance anthology — a young man and a blonde woman embrace in a doorway while a watchful red-haired woman peers through the foliage in the foreground, her expression a mix of longing and dismay. The tagline "Can First Love Be True Love?" sets the emotional stakes perfectly for a book packed with "True Love Stories," including Jack Sparling's interior tale "My Heart Played Politics." For ten cents, this issue delivers the kind of heartfelt, dramatic romance storytelling that made Harvey's First Love Illustrated a reliable destination for readers in 1952.