Nope. Dead asleep as usual. Looks like I'll be polishing the jewelry again tonight, if you know what I mean.
This book has nothing to do with polishing jewelry—i.e. masturbation—though the cover could be interpreted that way. Or maybe that's just our dirty minds. Anyway, the story deals not with female needs, but with the dawn of the communist witch hunt era in the U.S., and how one man is targeted, with negative effects upon his wife, ex-wife, son, et al. The cover is supposed to depict the dawning of suspicion and distrust in the main character's once stable marriage. The novel originally appeared in hardback in 1949, this Popular Library abridged paperback hit bookstores in 1950, and as is often the case with this publisher, the art is uncredited.
And now, just because we came across them (and about two-hundred others), here are fifteen terms for female masturbation, ranging from the absurd to the sublime:
15: Muffin buffin'
14: Manual override
13: Clicking the mouse
12: Reading braille
11: Playing with Mrs. Palmer's daughters
10: Backslappin' the beaver
9: Driving Miss Daisy
8: Visiting the magic kingdom
7: Making soup
6: Hoodwinking
5: Searching for Spock
4: Beating around the bush
3: Soloing on the clitar
2: Tip-toeing through the two lips
1: Fingering the accused*
*also useful for communist witch hunts
Sweetie, stop. I said I like sensitive men, but I meant one who puts the toilet seat down.
Merle Miller’s That Winter is one of the better post-World War II novels, dealing with the time-honored theme of veterans struggling to fit in after their military service. One has a dead end job, another believes he can function only in the army, and another is trying to hide the fact that he’s Jewish. In the area of feeling forced to hide an essential aspect of oneself, Miller knew exactly what he was writing about. In 1971 at the age of fifty-one, during a time when he was a public intellectual of considerable stature, he came out in the New York Times Magazine as gay. The article catapulted him into the forefront of gay activism, a status he maintained the rest of his life. That Winter was his first novel, appearing in 1948, with the above Popular Library edition hitting shelves in 1950. The great cover art could be by Earle Bergey, but Christopher P. Stephens’ reference tome A Checklist of the Popular Library Paperbacks lists no illustrator, so we’ll have to go with unknown on this one for now.
