 Well fine. If you really want to know, in my experience, you're very much on the smaller side. 
Above: the 1965 sleaze novel Ask Me No Questions by Carter McCord, with cover art by Paul Rader. Be careful what you ask. If you aren't—just look at the poor guy in the background—you could end up like him.
 There are a lot of members, but they all come away satisfied. 
Arthur Adlon's Key Club Girl is pretty limp for a sleaze novel. If we planned to resell it we'd be depressing its value by saying that, but we can't lie—it has no spark. It's about a virginal woman named Lena who's unable to consummate relationships with a series of men, including her husband. She solves the problem with the help of an eager man named Lee and the behind the scenes action at the Golden Key Club. She doesn't end up with Lee, though. Her husband Quentin, who was so disappointed when he learned on the wedding night that Lena abhored sex, and has since divorced her, ends up with her after all. We won't bother with more of a plot summary. Life's short, we have these sleaze novels coming in all the time, and most of them are better than Key Club Girl. The art on this, however, is sublime. It's what enticed us to buy it. Paul Rader painted it, and if you look closely you'll see a topless reflection in the vanity mirror, and in the background, way back, a man straddling a chair. Nice work. 
 Knight falls in the City of Light. 
We weren't impressed with Adam Knight's Sugar Shannon, but excellent Paul Rader cover art earned him another chance with Girl Running, published in 1956 by Signet. It has the built in advantage of being set in Paris, but in the end we have to conclude that Knight just isn't a good writer. Here's a sample, and note that when he says “stay alive” he's talking about staying awake:
I beat it back to the hotel, fighting hard to stay alive for a little while longer. I lost the fight. A shower only rocked me for a brief pause. Then the important muscles gave way and fatigue took me to bed for a cat nap. I told myself that I could sleep two hours. I phoned the desk to jerk me awake at about noon. Then Morpheus grabbed me.
Knight's main character goes to sleep three times in that paragraph—or twice, if we want to be generous. Also, the idea of a “cat nap” is incongrous with total fatigue. A cat nap is light sleep. Even sleeping for only two hours, he'd be dead to the world. The snippet is a microcosm of the book—messy, disarranged, and lacking flow and rhythm. So when it comes to Knight we'll call it a day. He's just not our thing.
 *sigh* I'm still confused how I was charged for not having something. 
They say possession is nine tenths of the law, but that last tenth can get mighty interesting if the thing you don't possess when the cops come along is, for example, identification, or clothing, or, apparently morals. Paul Hunter's 1961 novel Morals Charge deals with an eighteen-year old named Nancy who is lusted after by her mother's boyfriend, falls into the clutches of a big city racketeer, is jailed on a morals charge and abused by cops intent on using her to snare bigger prey. Paul Rader handles the cover work here, and it's a typically excellent effort. Mid-century paperback art would be far less entertaining without him, and though everything he does is great, if you want to see some of our favorites, check here, here, here, and here. We also have a mini-collection here.
 She's not the sharpest ho in the toolshed.  
Lana, by Joan Ellis, is sleaze fiction about a fifteen-year-old girl with poor critical reasoning skills. Which is to say she's D-U-M. Basically, she falls for an older guy who pimps her out. Her rationalizations around this are hilarious. Prostitutes often form co-dependent bonds with their pimps, so we hear, but Ellis didn't handle that aspect with sufficient skill, instead making poor Lana flat-out superficial. But hey—it's a sleaze novel. You don't go into it expecting Les Miserables. This is copyright 1960 with Paul Rader cover art (of a figure that looks a lot like Elsa Martinelli). By the way, if for some reason you don't know the term “ho,” look here.
 We'll play the corporate merger game later. Just this once I actually need you to type something. 
Above you see a cover for Sin Now, Pay Later, which was written by Allan Horn, the keen literary mind behind such books as Molester's Trap and Whore from Maupin Street. And you wonder why all these guys wrote under pseudonyms. Sin Now, Pay Later is 1967 with cover art by Paul Rader.
 You'll need to use some deodorant before I do anything like that again. 
1964's The Mark of a Man tells the story of a mill worker in a dead end town who has simple desires, but whose girlfriend wants him to show more ambition. You know that's a recipe for trouble. Collier's prose is better than normal for Midwood, according to one review we read, but we're more interested, as usual, in artist Paul Rader, who was showcased on scores of Midwood covers and is great here as well. We've featured him often, but if you're unfamiliar with his work we suggest you behold his genius here, here, here, and here. You'll be glad you did.
 You know what? Don't worry about it. The first time wasn't that great anyway. 
Above, a Paul Rader cover for Twice with Julie by Jason Hytes, aka John Plunkett. The lesson here? Every man has his limitations. Copyright 1962.
 Once you go down there's no turning back. 
But isn't Third Street in the other direction? We're gonna go down the third street. You mean the third street from here? If you wanna think of it that way. Why are you holding my hand? The third street gets slippery. You'll see.
Super rare Joan Ellis authored Midwood-Tower lesbian sleaze novel about a painter and model who come together over more than just art, 1964, with Paul Rader on the cover chores.
 Why don't you get undressed and we'll have a coming in party instead. 
It's mandatory to occasionally share a cover from Midwood-Tower, so above you see Coming Out Party by Kimberly Kemp, who was a pseudonym, in this case occupied by Gilbert Fox. The story involves a homeless beauty picked up on the street by a wealthy NYC couple who give her a place to live but turn her into a plaything—topless chores, nude photographs, sexual duties with the heads of house. You know—the usual maid stuff. They may be dirty people but at least everyone ends up sqeaky clean. The cover art is by Paul Rader, and the copyright is 1965.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
2009—Farrah Fawcett Dies
American actress Farrah Fawcett, who started as a model but became famous after one season playing detective Jill Munroe on the television show Charlie's Angels, dies after a long battle with cancer. 1938—Chicora Meteor Lands
In the U.S., above Chicora, Pennsylvania, a meteor estimated to have weighed 450 metric tons explodes in the upper atmosphere and scatters fragments across the sky. Only four small pieces are ever discovered, but scientists estimate that the meteor, with an explosive power of about three kilotons of TNT, would have killed everyone for miles around if it had detonated in the city. 1973—Peter Dinsdale Commits First Arson
A fire at a house in Hull, England, kills a six year old boy and is believed to be an accident until it later is discovered to be a case of arson. It is the first of twenty-six deaths by fire caused over the next seven years by serial-arsonist Peter Dinsdale. Dinsdale is finally captured in 1981, pleads guilty to multiple manslaughter, and is detained indefinitely under Britain's Mental Health Act as a dangerous psychotic.
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