Above, Judson Grey’s Twilight Girls, from Epic Originals, 1962. Grey was a pseudonym, of course, because who’d actually take credit for this? The authors were Jim Harmon and Ron Haydock, two guys who as Grey, Vin Saxon, and Don Sheppard cooked up such fare as Wanton Witch, Lust for Lace, and Ape Rape, the last title made all the more frightening because it isn’t in any way a euphemism. In Twilight Girls a man is pitted against a militant lesbian group called the League of Amazons and wins by using the only tool at his disposal—his cock. High art it isn’t, but the Doug Weaver cover made us smile, and we especially like the placement of the knife in the composition as both a penis substitute and castration threat. Silly and sublime.
1937—Carothers Patents Nylon
Wallace H. Carothers, an American chemist, inventor and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont Corporation, receives a patent for a silk substitute fabric called nylon. Carothers was a depressive who for years carried a cyanide capsule on a watch chain in case he wanted to commit suicide, but his genius helped produce other polymers such as neoprene and polyester. He eventually did take cyanide—not in pill form, but dissolved in lemon juice—resulting in his death in late 1937.