Blue Prints

The bottle blond on the book cover lounges in the doorway of her mobile home, hair tousled, arms spread wide, cleavage worthy of a Wonderbra.

“Sin on Wheels,” the title reads, in case you somehow missed the point.

The paperback, one of thousands of pulp novels produced in the 1940s and ‘50s, once filled a niche now firmly occupied by the likes of Jerry Springer, “Hard Copy” and the Playboy Channel.

The stuff between the endpapers didn’t always add up to much. But the first time Todd Collins laid eyes on one of the brightly colored, decidedly lurid covers, he saw art.

“I walked into a friend’s closet in Seattle and he had all of these pulp fiction paperbacks,” the 33-year-old Los Angeles resident recalls, “and I thought they were great. They were art.”

With two high school friends as partners, Collins bought a digital printer, hired a lawyer, arranged for publication rights and launched Floating Brick Studio in West Hollywood last fall.

“We’re taking something that’s old and making it contemporary,” says Michael McCarty, Collins’ partner who scans the covers into a computer, refines the images, then prints them on thick cotton watercolor paper imported from France. “People walk in and say, ‘Hey, that would look cool on my wall.’ ”

Floating Brick offers about 60 pulp fiction prints, ranging from murder mystery and romance covers to those from novels that flirt with formerly taboo subjects such as homosexuality. Framed prints come in three sizes and cost $50, $150 and $500.

The most popular so far are “Sin on Wheels” and “Lust Can’t Hide,” a bondage fantasy about a man chained to a bed by a most unusual mother and daughter.

“The prints deal with some adult material, but there’s something innocent about them too,” Collins says. “There’s no question they come from a more innocent time, and people really like that.”

* Floating Brick Studio is at 8713 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood; (310) 659-3171.