 Better late than never is our motto around here. 
We're finally getting back to paperback artist Gene Bilbrew, whose odd style, with its scantily clad women and their muscular butts has become collectible in recent years. We didn't get it at first, but like a lot of art, once you're exposed to it regularly you begin to appreciate its unique qualities. There's clear intent in Bilbrew's work, a deliberate attempt to approach illustration from a different angle, and we've grown to understand that his cartoonish, chaotic, often humorous, and often bondage themed aesthetic is purposeful. In fact, his imagery has become so intertwined with the bdsm scene that in 2019 the National Leather Association International established an award named after Bilbrew for creators of animated erotic art. While it's not exactly a Pulitzer Prize, the point is that Bilbrew's bizarre visions keep gaining wider acceptance. So for that reason we've put together another group of his paperback fronts. You can see more of them here, here, and here, and you can see a few rare oddities here, here, and here.                   
 You know, I don't see any reason why I can't appoint both of you secretary of human services. 
In case you're wondering, human services is an actual function of the U.S. government. The department is called Health and Human Services, and there's no healthier human service than sex. You can guess the plot of 1967's Lust Candidate without too much trouble. An honest politician squares off for a governorship against a slick media star, while all sorts of craziness goes on behind the scenes with wives, mistresses, and a hot young stepdaughter. We love the art. It's often attributed to John Duillo, but Doug at the (now mostly defunct) blog whatgetsmehot suspected Elaine Duillo was behind this one, and back in 2010 sent an image of the cover to her. The answer she gave was revealing. Apparently, she painted the blonde on the right because the people at Chevron Books didn't didn't like the figure the first artist had produced. “They asked me to paint the blonde again. Then they stripped it in and paid me well to do this for them.” To our eyes it looks like one artist wielded the brush here, but we presume Elaine Duillo knows her own work. We also presume she knows whether she replaced her husband's work, so it looks like those John Duillo attributions could be wrong. We'll put this in the two-thirds-unknown bin for now. That's a new bin, but there you go.
 Faced with this position surrender is the only option. 
Here you see a pose that appears over and over in vintage paperback art—one figure looming menacingly in the foreground as a second cowers in the triangular negative space created by the first’s spread legs. This pose is so common it should have a name. We’re thinking “the alpha,” because it signifies male dominance and because of the A shape the pose makes. True, on occasion the dominator isn’t male, sometimes the unfortunate sprawled figure is depicted outside the A shaped space, and sometimes the art expresses something other than dominance, but basically the alpha (see, that just sounds right, doesn’t it?) has been used scores of times with only minor variation. You’ll notice several of these come from subsidiaries of the sleaze publisher Greenleaf Classics. It was a go-to cover style for them. We have twenty examples in all, with art by Bob Abbett, Robert Bonfils, Michel Gourdon, and others.
 Authors like Barbara Hoffman gave sleaze a new twist. 
How do you make sleaze better? Pass it off as educational. During the 1960s, a time when sexual research was experiencing a bit of a—if you’ll excuse the expression—growth spurt, a subset of the sleaze market arose in which fictional clinical studies were passed off as serious scholarship. Barbara Hoffman was one of the go-to authors for this type of fiction, and wrote analyses such as The Baby Pros (a study of teenaged prostitution), The Adulteress (a report on unfaithful wives), Teenaged Seductress (a report on promiscuity among teenaged girls), Woman Loves Boy (a study of older women’s relationships with teenaged boys) and The Youth Lovers, above (which purported to document relationships between older men and teenaged girls). While some minimal research may have gone into the text, people bought these books for the steamy details included in the phony case studies. Doctors were quoted to provide a gloss of legitimacy, but they too may have been fictional, and in fact, Barbara Hoffman herself never existed, but was a pen name for veteran sleaze author Russell Trainer, the man who gave the world The Lolita Complex. That’s a story all its own, which we may share later.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1908—First Airplane Fatality Occurs
The plane built by Wilbur and Orville Wright, The Wright Flyer, crashes with Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge aboard as a passenger. The accident kills Selfridge, and he becomes the first airplane fatality in history. 1983—First Black Miss America Crowned
Vanessa Williams becomes the first African American Miss America. She later loses her crown when lesbian-themed nude photographs of her are published by Penthouse magazine. 1920—Terrorists Bomb Wall Street
At 12:01 p.m. a bomb loaded into a horse-drawn wagon explodes in front of the J.P.Morgan building in New York City. 38 people are killed and 400 injured. Italian anarchists are thought to be the perpetrators, but after years of investigation no one is ever brought to justice. 1959—Khrushchev Visits U.S.
Nikita Khrushchev becomes the first Soviet leader to visit the United States. The two week stay includes talks with U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, as well as a visit to a farm and a Hollywood movie set, and a tour of a "typical" American neighborhood, upper middle class Granada Hills, California.
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