Audio By Carbonatix
“YOU DIRTY HOG!” Eyzie Miles slashed at Bo Bodell with a kitchen knife. “Go wash yourself before you handle me,” she flared . . . In her heart, though, Eyzie knew that Bo would come back for her. But she never dreamed that when he did return, he would find her married to his half-wit brother!
Back-cover blurb
from Her Life to Live, by Oriana Atkinson
(Popular Library, 1951)
Forty years ago, two-bit babes like Eyzie (no doubt pronounced “easy”) were a dime a dozen.
You’d find them in drugstores, newsstands, smoke shops and wherever else paperbacks were sold, flaunting their wanton wares from the covers of 25-cent sizzlers like Hoboes and Harlots, Shack Baby, and Hitch-Hike Hussy.
Turgid. Torrid. Tawdry. Lurid Loreleis of literature didn’t come any cheaper than this.
But Eyzie and her scarlet sisterhood have moved up in the world. Once the scourge of publishers’ row, these down-and-dirty dames now name their own prices.
Four decades ago, when her story first rolled off the press, Eyzie’s exploits could be had for a quarter. Today a mint-condition copy of her checkered past–if you’re lucky enough to find one–will set you back as much as $30. Not bad for a gal who once was reduced to performing a “barbaric” dance in a backwoods cellar–a ribald routine dutifully captured by the paperback’s cover artist, right down to the slobbering moonshiner gleefully ripping off her gown.
Sorry, ladies, but up until 25 years ago, the paperback universe was a man’s world. It was a literary landscape populated by such colorful characters as Hot Dames on a Cold Slab, Keyhole Peeper, and Swamp Brat, a pulp-ridden paradise where Song of the Whip rang through the air over places like Shabby Street and Rapture Alley.
Aimed at male readers seeking spice during the relatively sexless post-WWII-Eisenhower era (a period roughly bookended by Esquire’s Vargas girl on one end and a Penthouse Pet on the other), raunchy relics like these promised readers thick slices of life in the raw, heavy on the onions.
Three decades later, their lascivious legacy lives on as nostalgic baby boomers pay top dollar to relive the paperback sins of their fathers.
“It’s the `forbidden fruit’ syndrome,” says dealer Blake Shira, owner of Lost Dutchman Comics. Now dealing and collecting vintage paperbacks for nearly twenty years, the 38-year-old Shira still remembers the days when tantalizing titles like Hill Hellion, Gutter Gang, and Trailer Tramp ruled the racks. “Back then, grown-ups were always telling you, `Leave that alone! Go read a comic book, go play with your baseball cards but stay away from those paperbacks. They’re too sleazy!'”
Browsing through Shira’s inventory of softcover salaciousness–a collection of 15,000 titles roughly spanning a 25-year period beginning in 1940–the casual observer is inclined to agree.
Pick a book–any book–and you’re almost certain to be assaulted with the cover image of a sultry siren en deshabille languishing amidst some of the most overheated copy ever to come out of a typewriter.
“She dared enter a lesbian world,” shrieks the tag line from Strange Sisters. Meanwhile, over on the cover of Confessions of a Psychiatrist, the peignoir-clad pretty writhing on the couch apparently has good reason to shrink away from her addled analyst–“Every Boudoir Was His Office–Every Patient His Plaything.”
Not even nonfiction was immune from the hothouse art direction of the era. In an effort to inject some sex into the then-new UFO frenzy, the cover art for 1951’s Behind the Flying Saucers suggests that should the nation ever be threatened by extraterrestrial invasion, American women would immediately respond by running through the streets in their sheerest negligees.
“Actually, these covers are much, much more suggestive than anything you’ll find inside the books,” reports Shira. “If you ever read one of these things, they’re extremely tame by today’s standards. Today, you can find much racier stuff in any grocery store.”
Even by yesterday’s standards, some paperbacks didn’t deliver anything much hotter than the reading material then routinely found in any high school English-lit class. Just ask the long-ago suckers who plunked down a quarter for The Art of Love. A racy-sounding romp penned by “A French Casanova,” the book was actually a retitled version of Cyrano de Bergerac. Not to be outdone, another publisher attempted to transform Mark Twain into an early-day Harold Robbins by rechristening Twain’s Puddin’head Wilson as The Unnatural Son.
Not surprisingly, these deceptive curios are now in collector’s circles. Still, neither title comes close to fetching the kind of price that a top-grade copy of Reform School Girl can bring.
According to the most recent edition of The Paperback Price Guide, a mint-condition copy of the 1948 delinquency potboiler (“A shameful path led her there–A scarlet secret kept her there!”) is worth up to $35O. That’s nearly twice the value of what is generally regarded as America’s first mass-market paperback: a 1939 Pocket Book edition of Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good Earth. If Shira’s inventory is any indication, paperback readers of the past were much less interested in The Good Earth than The Life Lousy. Sex, sadism and salaciousness were many paperback houses’ stock-in-trade, and woe to the publisher who couldn’t figure out how to incorporate a skull, a corpse and/or the suggestion of spice into the cover design of even the most high-minded writing. (“What did this man want?” asks the cover of Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt as a middle-aged man ogles a young woman of dubious virtue.)
Babbitt’s desires notwithstanding, most readers knew exactly what they wanted, even if publishers rarely complied. “When I was growing up, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was it!” Ellis Peterson, owner of Scottsdale’s Words From Our Past bookstore, smiles as he recalls the D.H. Lawrence classic that was once the last word in smut. “Every copy of that book had the `good’ pages marked back,” he says. “The same thing with all the Mickey Spillane stuff like Kiss Me Deadly. You’d see the picture of the ripped dress–wow! But then you’d read the book and it hardly had anything to do with the cover. Of course, you’ve got to realize these companies were selling something and the cover was the advertisement.”
A generation later, that advertising continues to sell books–even if few collectors are interested in the tepid text within.
“Sure, sleaze is always going to be popular,” says Shira. Still, collecting patterns now extend beyond the novelty of bygone sexism or the shock value of racist rarities like 12 Chinks and a Woman or Nigger Heaven. “I’ve got people coming in here who collect all sorts of stuff,” says Shira, ticking off a list that includes sci-fi, westerns, juvenile delinquency, war, mysteries and even books featuring the works of specific cover artists.
Books by writers whose literary skill was later eclipsed by notoriety in other fields are also popular, reports Shira. Prior to his involvement in Watergate, E. Howard Hunt banged out a number of espionage thrillers, and L. Ron Hubbard, everybody’s favorite Scientologist, once cranked out a sci-fi opus titled Return to Tomorrow (“They came back to Earth to find a world of hostile strangers!”).
And, of course, there are always customers who are simply eager to read an out-of-print title by writers like Harlan Ellison, William Burroughs, and Jim Thompson, latter-day cult authors who honed their craft in the lowly paperback trenches. “Nope, they don’t make ’em like this anymore,” smiles Shira as he fondly examines a copy of I Was a Nazi Flier, one of his top-of-the-line rarities. The cover art depicts a skeleton in full military regalia, firing a machine gun over a sea of skulls huddled under a giant red swastika. “When the last Price Guide came out in ’82, this was worth about $60,” he says. Noting that a revised version of the guide is due out later this spring, Shira rubs his hands together for comic effect. “I’m real anxious to find out what it’s worth today.”
But when The Paperback Price Guide #3 finally hits the bookstalls later this month, Blake Shira may discover that his Nazi Flier hasn’t gained much financial altitude.
“The field just hasn’t grown the way some people thought it would,” says bibliophile Kevin Hancer, who reports that the third edition of his guide will feature more “conservative” pricing. “Whether you’re talking about toys, comics or whatever, during the Eighties a lot of collectibles hit a flat spot in terms of new people coming into the field and prices being realized.”
Given his druthers, the Edina, Minnesota, collector would prefer to ignore dollar signs altogether. Following a rash of cash-in-your-trash stories that greeted publication of his first book, Hancer has spent the past ten years dodging misguided collectors suffering from what he terms the “National Enquirer something-for-nothing” mentality. “I go out to these flea markets and see my own guide being used against me all the time,” he complains. “They’ll take these books, throw them out on a rough table with no protection whatsoever and the books get partially destroyed just from getting shoved around. Then, there’s the hot sun shining down on them all weekend. But they’ve seen my guide, so they take this book that they think is worth $20 and write the price on the front cover–in ink.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called a crook, a liar, a thief, or just about anything else when I’ve tried to acquaint some of these people with the fact that they didn’t have what they thought they had.”
Claiming that his illustrated guide is first and foremost a comprehensive listing of more than 33,000 American paperbacks published during a thirty-year period, Hancer says, “I’d just as soon put out a book like this and say to hell with the prices. Let someone else determine that or the free market determine that. My prime goal is, and always has been, to disseminate information. This is the kind of book that I wish I’d been able to find when I first started collecting.”
When Hancer began researching his first guide, he quickly learned why no such reference work existed. “If you want to investigate motion pictures, publication histories or whatever else, the worst thing you can do is go to the people who produced in the first place,” he complains. “Their sense of history stinks. The information that I did get back from the companies that bothered to respond was sketchy, inaccurate and incomplete. By and large, they were saying `Hey, if you ever put this thing together, let us know. We’d like to know what we did.'”
Much to its everlasting chagrin, at least one company found out something it wished it hadn’t done. Chuckling, Hancer recalls the publishing house that was so oblivious to the then-booming collectors market that it dumped its entire back stock into discount department store chains around the nation several years ago. “Here they were selling thirty- and forty-year-old books at three-for-a-dollar–including books that even at that time were worth $30 and $40 apiece,” he says. “Every collector in the country was heading for his K mart.”
That, says Hancer, was one for the book. His book.
