Review: Sin-A-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties
(I've thoroughly enjoyed Drake sharing this book with me! Here's his review! ~AC)Sin-A-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties
Edited by Brittany A Daley, Hedi El Kholti, Earl Kemp, Miriam Linna, and Adam Parfrey
2005, Feral House, $24.95
Drake here.
I’m a big fan of old paperbacks and can lose myself in them for hours without ever actually opening one (although there are some masterpieces of nearly forgotten fiction to be found between their covers too). Art, editorial choice, back cover blurbs – I find all of the trappings of early mass market publishing to be fascinating stuff.
In the 40s and 50s, mainstream publishers used sex to sell a lot of books that weren’t intrinsically sexy. True erotica was pretty much homebrew material, sold through back channels and from under counters. This changed in the early 1960s, following a series of high profile obscenity trials for books such as Fanny Hill, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Naked Lunch. With a sense that they had at least an orange caution light, paperback publishers plunged naked and erect into a sea of smut. Sin-A-Rama is a marvelous collection of paperback covers and memoirs of that era.The best of the texts is Robert Silverberg’s My Life as a Pornographer, available here online. Best known as a writer of imaginative and edgy science fiction, Mr. Silverberg’s astonishing output of smut under the name Don Elliott practically fueled the fledgling industry in its formative years. His reminiscences are entertaining, funny, and insightful. Other aficionados and survivors of the era provide histories of publishing houses, authors, and
artists who contributed to the books, including such luminaries as Ed Wood Jr., Gene Bilbrew, and Robert Bonfils. Insanely entertaining and educational, if somewhat sketchy, the text pieces in Sin-A-Rama seem like only the slightest glimpse of a nearly lost world and left me wanting more.Of course, the real purpose for making a book like Sin-A-Rama is to showcase the cover art for these little gems of prurient marketing, and Feral House is second only to Taschen in the field of popular culture art books. Page after page of kinky, eccentric, and unlikely covers provide the equivalent of browsing the shelves in a backstreet store of the period.
The ephemera of cultures are incredibly revealing and this – the first explosion of mass market erotica – reveals much about the desires and preoccupations of mid-century America. I recommend Sin-A-Rama without reservation to anyone with an interest in the roots of modern erotica.
Posted by Angela Caperton at 7/27/2010 7:52 PM 
Categories: delete, Porn, Drake, Books, Pulps, Sin-A-Rama
Tags: Paperbacks Pulps Review Porn Drake Books Sin-A-Rama
Categories: delete, Porn, Drake, Books, Pulps, Sin-A-Rama
Tags: Paperbacks Pulps Review Porn Drake Books Sin-A-Rama
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