By Harrison White
Sex Carnival explores lesbianism under the big tent. Caged Lust asks the sexual question, "Can a big-breasted babe find love with a big hairy gorilla, literally?" Orgy Delight, Sex Happy Hippie, and the verbose The Sensual Sunset Strip Sex-A-Go-Go don't need any explanation.
As anyone who's taken a creative writing course knows, a scribe worth his or her quill has to hook the reader with the very first sentence. The publishers of erotic paperbacks took that advice and went one step beyond. The made sure their titles were eye and crotch catchers and then assigned a talented illustrator to paint a colorfully arousing cover to seal the deal.
"What generally occurred was that they went from the cover image," explains editor and publisher Adam Parfrey. "It was the opposition of how a book is usually made; the cover is made from the book itself. Here a book is made from the cover."
Parfrey enlisted a slew of talented editors to produce Sin-A-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties (Feral House), including former editor of Greenleaf Classics Earl Kemp, who actually was jailed for his work as a sex paperback worker. Other contributors such as no-wave rocker Lydia Lunch; actor, director, and writer John Gilmore; and science-fiction author Robert Silverberg all help to create this definitive and graphic look inside the nearly forgotten world of dirty books.
"Except for one or two books that came out about the gay sleaze books, there's never been a collection about or an examination of the straight world in sleaze publishing," explains Parfrey on his motivation to publish Sin-A-Rama. "The more I looked into it and spoke to people involved in it, the more fascinating it became. There are a lot of very important writers who wrote for it and important illustrators who did covers and interior illustrations that used pseudonyms."
Some of the more famous scribblers to make a cheap buck off the burgeoning world of sexy novels were Georges Bataille, author of the explicit literary classic Story of the Eye, which Bj?/a> cites as an influence; Edgar-, Hugo- and Nebula-winning science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison; bestselling historical fiction penman John Jakes; mystery writer Donald E. Westlake; and infamous bad director of Plan 9 from Outer SpaceEdward D. Wood Jr.
"Ed Wood wrote sleaze books for a number of companies--he was often paid in booze," Parfrey notes, laughing. "But he was paid in cash too. He tapped out a novel right there. He wasn't even allowed to take the stuff home, because you'd never see anything from him again. He'd take the money home. There's some background on that in the book, and also background on what comments he made to John Gilmore, another writer, on his suggestions on how to deal with non-paying sleaze publishers."
Some of Wood's theatrical work ended up on the shelves of adult bookstores, such as his novel of Orgy of the Dead, the erotic horror movie from 1965 directed by Stephen C. Apostolof with a screenplay by Wood.
By the time Wood was hawking his manuscripts to sleaze publishing houses he was at the end of his career and close to an untimely death from heart failure. "He was also doing Super 8 sexual-instruction mail-order loops," says Parfrey. "However he could roll a nickel on the lowest level of commerce, Ed Wood was there."
The themes of sleaze paperbacks were a reflection of their times. From chapter headings such as "Sick Suburbia", "Radical Sex", and "Butch Swish" to "Some Weird Sin" the covers and the stories exposed the fears and titillation of its readers. "Women weren't buying these things," Parfrey explains. "It was middle-aged, middle-class white men. Their concerns are addressed, really, like drunken pastimes. It got into others things, like exotica music, exotic sex with dusty-skinned ladies. As the decade went on it would be concerned with other things. As the '60s rolled into psychedelia, youth culture, and rock and roll, these books addressed that stuff and the confusion of the '60s, particularly for white, middle-aged, middle-class people."
Salacious cover art by John Healey, best known for his lurid lesbian covers (Lewd Women), and others such as fetish artist Eric Stanton and cartoonist Bill Ward first drew Parfrey to the forgotten genre. "They're very offbeat and fascinating," he says. "They weren't overseen too greatly, so you could get away with a hell of a lot. They're so wacky and extraordinary they can only be done, obviously, when there's not only ability and talent with the illustrators, but also when they could take chances and go places they weren't allowed in other spheres."
But it was the popularity of this ephemeral smut literature that really surprised him. "When you think of dirty little paperbacks that aren't even counted as being books by the Library of Congress or even collectors until recent years, you'd think, 'God, they must not have sold any,'" Parfrey says. "But some sold into the hundreds of thousands of copies, far better than most major books at the time."
It was also a shock at how hard law enforcement tried to crack down on this seemingly innocent expression. "I didn't realize the FBI was after softcore publishers as harshly as they were, and they were!" exclaims Parfrey. "That's extraordinary. It's extraordinary that people went to jail for publishing these types of books that were not hardcore. They were softcore. That was amazing. It just shows there was a different latitude that existed back then. I found these intriguing official bust photographs of these Brooklyn cops going after the warehouses of people who distributed these things. That was fascinating. They'd be holding this stuff up, books like these were considered really filthy and extremely dirty, even those that never directly described the sex act. It was all through euphemisms."
Where the police were impotent in shutting down the industry, increasingly explicit magazines and movies finally nailed the coffin shut on the era of provocative sleaze.
"These books, their heyday was in the early to mid-'60s and then as the '60s later went on there was less interest in these things, particularly when the magazines themselves got dirtier and dirtier and you could buy a Penthouse magazine and you could see pubic hair," explains Parfey. "That was very exciting for people back then, as extraordinary as that seems today.
"Then in the early '70s these books really didn't pack much of a punch anymore and they got into the hardcore-type verbiage. They would describe sex scenes directly. The painted covers got less interesting and there were more photographic covers. Then they became just hardcore dirty books. There were some sales of them, but far less numbers than they had sold in the early and middle '60s.
"I think they kept up into the '80s and into the '90s on some level, the hardcore paperbacks. But there are not many of them left these days. They're more in that funky mode, like for people with particular interests like amputees, not as broadly designed."
But thanks to Feral House, Parfrey, and the publication of Sin-A-Rama horny days are here again!
