At this rate we're both going to end up getting an F. And not one that stands for anything good.
We never went to summer school. We just weren't bad enough students for that but now we see it may have had its good points, as seen on this cover for Tony Calvano's, aka Thomas P. Ramirez's Summer Lust, about students in summer session who can't keep their minds on their work. Greenleaf Classics could turn even the most obscure scenarios into sleaze, so you know something as obvious as summer school basically wrote itself. It's copyright 1965, with cover art by an unknown.
Now I'll show you what we oilmen call directional drilling.
We always have to circle back to Greenleaf Classics because their covers are so brazenly funny. Oiled for Lust appeared in 1967 with the pseudonymous J.X. Williams credited as author. Many writers used the Williams name, but in this case even the Greenleaf Classics website is stumped as to who the author really was. Slide this into the unknown bin for now.
I'm getting pretty fed up with your attitude, mister. You should try being as friendly as your wife.
John Deering meets a sexpot in a bar who offers him employment with her rich aunt. The aunt—this is a sleaze book, so she's a total cougar—is mysterious about the job, but when you send your daughter to find a man in a bar what do you suppose the job will be? The aunt lounges about in bed half naked and tells John she'll pay him just to hang around her mansion, allegedly so she can study him and see if he's the right man for the still unspecified job. It's about at this point that he realizes she has no feet. Which makes this passage rather interesting: “He could not help noticing that her nightgown was high on her hips. She was exposed to his view. He tried not to look at her cunt, but found it next to impossible not to do so. She has a beautiful body, he thought. She must have been ravishing once, before her accident. She still is, he thought further—no mistake about it. There is nothing about her that repels me, as she feared there might be. I find her damned pleasant to look at—feet or no feet.”
John is finally told about the job. The cougar and her husband can't inherit unless they give the patriarch of the clan a grandchild. Why can't the hubby get the job done? Does it matter? This is sleaze. The only job that truly matters is giving readers boners. John is sexually attracted to the aunt, but also likes her daughter, who's more age appropriate for him. Complications arise, including—gasp!—murder. And that's all we'll say. Except that we really enjoy these silly books. The copyright on this one is 1967 and the art is by Ed Smith.
This is really fun! After this I'll shave your legs and pluck your eyebrows.
Above, a cover for Shame Star, copyright 1964, written by Evan Hunter using the pseudonym Dean Hudson for Idle Hours Books. Yep, we read it. It's about a free spirit named Francie Jordan who gets low on money, gets into nude modeling, and ends up involved in the NYC skin flick racket. The cover doesn't depict her, though. For some reason it shows a secondary character enjoying an assisted cleanse in a Japanese bathhouse in Harlem. Maybe someone could ask the artist why he chose that scene, but the cover is uncredited. Overall this is standard sleaze, maybe a hair better written than usual, but nothing we'd recommend.
Who you gonna call when 007 can't get the job done?
We said we'd get to Clyde Allison's, aka William Knoles' Agent 0008 and here we are, sooner than you thought. Above and below are covers for all twenty entries in the series. The idea here, of course, is a sleaze riff on James Bond, or possibly even a riff on the many imitators of Bond. The dominant literary motif is satire, but as a wise man once said, just because it's satirical doesn't mean it's smart or good. The cover art on most of these is by Robert Bonfils, doing some of his better work, with Darrel Millsap handling the chores on Platypussy, and an unknown tapped for The Sin Funnel. So we read a couple of these and they involve the spy agency SADISTO (Security and Administration Division of the Institute for Special Tactical Operations), which is located in a sprawling bunker beneath the Maryland countryside. There the agents, about sixty of them, male and female, attend briefings in a pillow covered den while lounging mostly nude, and take on assignments too difficult for MI5, the FBI, SPECTRE, the CIA, etc. Their main weapon is sex, and their main advantage is that they're utterly ruthless. They even use kidnapped college co-eds for live fire training sessions. Because they're sadistic like that. In The Desdamona Affair SADISTO's budget has been cut, their fleet of Jaguars exchanged for Volkswagens, and their banks of IBM computers swapped out for calculators and an abacus. 0008 goes after a villainess named Desdamona Eva de Struxion (D. Eva de Struxion) in order to steal a secret formula that could eliminate world hunger. Along the way he fights trained panthers, is captured by Indian maidens, and imprisoned in an oil tanker, but ends up with all the money de Struxion has accumulated selling the formula, which means SADISTO can once again afford fancy cars and big computers. The whole narrative is absurd the same way Sharknado is absurd. In Gamefinger 0008 is sent by SADISTO to the island of a madman named Cantwell Undershaft, aka Gamefinger, who wants to end war by broadcasting to the world via satellite lethal gladiatorial spectacles. The unwilling deaths of hundreds of kidnapped naked men and women, he reasons, will prevent the deaths of billions in World War III by slaking humanity's bloodlust. This book differs from the previous one due to the extreme violence, but the formula is the same. In a text with so many jokes, a few will hit the target, but the percentage is depressingly low and the glib approach generally wears thin.
At this point you must be wondering how we got through these. All we can say is they're curiostities—stupid, poorly written curiosities. We can't imagine anyone reading more than two—one to get the general dumb idea, and the second to confirm that the idea remains dumb. Most of the content is sex, but written entirely without making a single explicit reference to penises, vaginas, oral sex, or bodily fluids. Doesn't that sound stimulating? If you should happen to want your own copies of these they usually go for around $100, which we consider wishful thinking on the part of the vendors, but with online buying, if you bide your time, someone will always sell at a more reasonable price.
This is the wickedest sorority prank in the history of— Hey, whoever's finger that is stop it right now!
Greenleaf Classics had the most ridiculous covers of any mid-century publishing company. There's no contest. This one for Clyde Allison's The Sex Spree is both absurd and, thanks to its colors, beautiful. Unfortunately the art is uncredited. The book appeared in 1962 from Greenleaf's imprint Midnight Reader, with author William Knoles the man operating behind the Allison pseudonym. Many Greenleaf pen names were shared, but as far as we can tell Allison belonged to Knoles alone, and he used it to write Greenleaf's spy-themed Agent 0008 entries, which are among the company's most collectible books. We're going to get to those in a bit.
Not bad, kid. You got talent. Now can you make them rotate in opposite directions?
Above, a typical piece of Greenleaf Classics sleaze, Flesh Act, written in 1963 by whoever inhabited the Don Wellman pseudonym this time out for the sub-imprint Ember Books. It's a tale about women, talent agents, movie producers, and the casting couch, 1963, with Ed Smith cover art. Smith has been a fertile source of visual material, as you can see here and here.
I felt so lonely and unappreciated I was going to jump. But then people started screaming, “Take it off! Take it off!”
It's been a while, so here's a cover from sleaze icon Darrel Millsap for Hoke Jackson's 1968 Candid Reader sleaze novel Along the Ledge to Lust. Jackson also wrote The Lecherous Age, Swappers in Heat, and Marriage for Four. He was not a person, though, but rather a pseudonym inhabited by various writers, so we don't know who really authored this, and we have a funny feeling they prefer it that way. More from Millsap here and here.
With all of you? Well, okay. If that's the custom. It may not look like a fifty dollar book, but that's what William Kane's Sin Safari recently sold for on Ebay. We also saw it selling for ninety bucks on another site. What you see is what you get here—white girl becomes sex plaything for primitive but precocious tribesmen. Well, they say cultural exchange is beneficial for everyone involved. The character is actually a globally famous heiress, a Paris Hilton type, which is not unusual in sleaze—i.e. the more untouchable the woman the more titillating her eventual defilement. 1966 copyright, uncredited cover art.
I've been practicing by milking Daisy. Just sit back and enjoy this. Above, a Robert Bonfils cover for Andrew Shaw's sleazer Bad Town, copyright 1966. Shaw was a Greenleaf Classics house pseudonym used by Lawrence Block and others, and was credited with books such as Sin Sucker, Sin Seer, Sintown Setup, Sin Alley—are you sensing a theme here?—Sin Bum, The Sin-Damned, Sin Hellcat...
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1985—Theodore Sturgeon Dies
American science fiction and pulp writer Theodore Sturgeon, who pioneered a technique known as rhythmic prose, in which his text would drop into a standard poetic meter, dies from lung fibrosis, which may have been caused by his smoking, but also might have been caused by his exposure to asbestos during his years as a Merchant Marine. 1945—World War II Ends
At Reims, France, German General Alfred Jodl signs unconditional surrender terms, thus ending Germany's participation in World War II. Jodl is then arrested and transferred to the German POW camp Flensburg, and later he is made to stand before the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials. At the conclusion of the trial, Jodl is sentenced to death and hanged as a war criminal. 1954—French Are Defeated at Dien Bien Phu
In Vietnam, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which had begun two months earlier, ends in a French defeat. The United States, as per the Mutual Defense Assistance Act, gave material aid to the French, but were only minimally involved in the actual battle. By 1961, however, American troops would begin arriving in droves, and within several years the U.S. would be fully embroiled in war. 1937—The Hindenburg Explodes
In the U.S, at Lakehurst, New Jersey, the German zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg catches fire and is incinerated within a minute while attempting to dock in windy conditions after a trans-Atlantic crossing. The disaster, which kills thirty-six people, becomes the subject of spectacular newsreel coverage, photographs, and most famously, Herbert Morrison's recorded radio eyewitness report from the landing field. But for all the witnesses and speculation, the actual cause of the fire remains unknown.
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