Sin-A-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties

Older readers may remember the lurid soft-X-rated paperbacks-titles like Topless Waitress, Lake of Lust, Casting Couch and so on-that crowded the shelves of newsstands and candy stores but more often adult bookstores in the 1960s. What most distinguished these paperbacks wasn't their narratives but their frequently amazing covers, swashes of erotic eye-candy that, as surely as a Warhol soupcan, now define an era. And so the emphasis in this first-rate celebration of these paperbacks is on the covers, with hundreds reproduced in what looks like accurate (i.e., soul-shocking) color. Most of these reproductions appear in the editors' grouping of sex paperbacks into various themes (Asphalt Jungle, Sex at Play, Butch Swish, etc.) but more show up in the startling essays and profiles that precede these groupings-startling for the several well-known authors profiled (Donald Westlake, Ed Wood, Lawrence Block) and for the praise-going by the illustrations, well justified-for a handful of the star cover artists. The book opens with overviews of the history of softcore paperback publishing by Jay A. Gertzman and Stephen J. Gertz and, most notably, by acclaimed SF author Robert Silverberg, who in "My Life as a Pornographer" recounts how by 1962 he was "turning out three Nightstand books a month" and earning enough money to buy "an enormous mansion in the finest residential neighborhood of New York City." A catalogue of "sleaze publishers" and a list of author pseudonyms (Miriam Gardner: Marion Zimmer Bradley; Paul Merchant: Harlan Ellison, etc.) close this informative and giddily entertaining book.
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