About this Item
New York, Arco Publishing Company, 1952. "Arco Sophisticate." First edition. First printing. Hardbound. Fine in a fine jacket. A clean tight copy, with publisher's price intact on front jacket flap ($2.00). Jacket has some slight wear to edge, one closed tear. Comes with archival-quality mylar jacket protector. "Robert W. Tracy," co-author of Touchable, was the pseudonym of Alvin Schwartz, whose enduring fame is as one of the early writers for Batman and Superman comics during the 1940s - he wrote the first Superman comic to feature Bizarro - and who, later, during the 1950s, wrote for Aquaman, The Flash, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman. Schwartz wrote his first Batman story in 1942, expanding into the Batman newspaper comic strip in August 1944 and the Superman strip two months later. Through 1952, he scripted for most of the company's newspaper strips. For rival Fawcett Comics, he wrote stories for Superman's chief competitor Captain Marvel. Schwartz wrote three novels for Arco Press including Man Maid and "Touchable." Another Arco title, the detective story "Sword of Desire" won praise for its takeoff on Wilhelm Reich's orgone therapy, a popular psychotherapeutic technique used during the 1940s and 1950s. His proto-Beat novel "The Blowtop" was published by Dial Press in 1948. Under the title Le Cinglé, it became a best-seller in France. In 1968, Schwartz moved to Canada, where he wrote documentaries and docudramas for the National Film Board of Canada for nearly 20 years, and created several economic and social studies for the Government of Canada. A look at Arco's endpapers--"sophisticate"--shows that the word is a code-word for "adult content." The press published lurid pulp fiction in hardcover. Jack Woodford, the 30s-40s screenwriter and author of soft-core pulp, was a mainstay of Arco. During 1951 and 1952, the Arco Publishing Company [established in 1937] issued between seven and twelve novels cowritten by Woodford, as part of their Arco Sophisticates series. Milton Gladstone, Arco's founder, had made a publishing breakthrough with a book on how to study for Army tests. There were several other titles in the Arco series, including MAN MAID, whose styles and themes imitated Woodford. In 1952, Gladstone was subpoenaed by the Gathings Committee, and reprimanded for several of the Sophisticates because they touched on nymphomania, drug use, gambling, and "perversions." One committee member felt he could not even mention many of the titles; they were 'filthy' and terrible, see US House of Representatives 230; News of the Week 2318. It may have been such pressure that made Gladstone stop issuing the Sophisticates line. These titillating novels were not sold in mainstream book shops. In addition to drugstores, Army bases, chain and department stores, typical retail outlets included urban tourist-tenderloin district, i.e. Times Square, NYC, bookstores. Gladstone sold Arco Publishing Company to Prentice Hall, a division of Simon & Schuster, in 1978. Seller Inventory # Fiction-T-2022
Contact seller
Report this item
