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), and Woman Loves Boy (a study of older women’s relationships with teenaged boys).
Above you see her 1965 book The Youth Lovers from Classics Library, and it purports to document relationships between older men and teenaged girls. While some minimal research may have gone into efforts such as these, people bought them 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 and His Daughter's Friend. He's very collected by the vintage crowd, which means we may never have an opportunity to acquire one of his books. But we'll sure try.
Hi. Becky said it would be okay if I slept over. She didn't specify in whose bedroom.
Above: the immediately identifiable work of the great Paul Rader fronting Russell Trainer's His Daughter's Friend. This is about a widower who gets into deep, deep trouble with a predatory teen. It came in 1964, after another book along the same lines, Wade Miller's famed Kitten with a Whip. Neither were among the first novels of their type. We'd guess the basic idea of adult-and-teen disaster goes back to the beginning of commercial publishing. The few we've read—aside from Lolita—feature girls above the age of consent back in 1964, and we bet that's the case here too. Those who don't read vintage books might suspect that such behavior is condoned, but it isn't—the entire point of these tales is that the men throw away or almost throw away everything, including their jobs, families, and freedom. We won't know exactly what His Daughter's Friend is about until we buy it, which we'll do, but not at two-hundred-plus dollars. That's the ask at the moment, and it's way too high. But someone will put it online at a reasonable price eventually. They almost always do.
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.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1939—Batman Debuts
In Detective Comics #27, DC Comics publishes its second major superhero, Batman, who becomes one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, and then a popular camp television series starring Adam West, and lastly a multi-million dollar movie franchise starring Michael Keaton, then George Clooney, and finally Christian Bale. 1953—Crick and Watson Publish DNA Results
British scientists James D Watson and Francis Crick publish an article detailing their discovery of the existence and structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, in Nature magazine. Their findings answer one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of biology, that of how living things reproduce themselves. 1967—First Space Program Casualty Occurs
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when, during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere after more than ten successful orbits, the capsule's main parachute fails to deploy properly, and the backup chute becomes entangled in the first. The capsule's descent is slowed, but it still hits the ground at about 90 mph, at which point it bursts into flames. Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission. 1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot.
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