| Intl. Notebook | Nov 24 2017 |
Lili St. Cyr and a side of El Rancho undressing.
These three very nice promotional postcards featuring legendary burlesque dancer Lili St. Cyr were put out by the El Rancho Vegas casino-hotel in Las Vegas, an establishment that was one of the city's first, predating iconic places like the Flamingo and the Last Frontier. St. Cyr peeled at El Rancho Vegas beginning in 1951, and these items were issued over the next several years as she returned to showcase there often. The rear of these are basically identical, which is why we've uploaded only one image below. You can see it has impresario Tom Douglas's signature on it, and management offers to shell out a few pennies by mailing it for you. Class acts all the way. And speaking of class acts, you can see plenty more of St. Cyr in the website. Just click her keywords below.
| Vintage Pulp | Nov 24 2017 |
So much for French chivalry.
This cover for Quatre pas dans la nuit fits right into our collection from earlier this year featuring ruthless men using women as human shields. In fact, it's the same painting by Barye Phillips used on Ben Benson's Broken Shield, which we included in that previous group. Quatre pas dans la nuit appeared in 1958 and is the French edition of the Ed Lacy novel Be Careful How You Live, which is in turn an expansion of his story "Time Wounds All Heels." We talked about Lacy a bit earlier this year, so if you want to know more check here.
| Vintage Pulp | Nov 23 2017 |
I know it's high. It used to be lower, but I spent a summer in D.C., and lemme tell ya, those guys taught me a lot about whoring.
We featured a Charles Rodewald cover last year and loved it, so we're bringing him back today, this time on the front of Ecstasy Novel Magazine, which is showcasing Paula Has a Price!, written by Perry Lindsay, aka prolific pulp author Peggy Gaddis. There's confusion online about the copyright on this, but it was published in January 1949. Top effort from Rodewald, and you can see another here.
| Femmes Fatales | Nov 23 2017 |
Nobody messes with Mara.
Mara Corday appears above in a promo photo for the crime drama Girls on the Loose, which she headlines as the owner of nightclub that's a front for her all-woman crime ring. It sounds interesting, so we'll try and track that one down. The photo dates from 1958.
| Hollywoodland | Nov 22 2017 |
Who'd like to help me perform a little experiment?
We've been seeing a lot of Sylva Koscina lately, haven't we? Well here's one of the biggest sex symbols of the 1960s again, this time on the front of an issue of National Enquirer that hit newsstands today in 1959. She says American men are boobs as lovers. Since she studied physics at university, we can only assume she used the scientific method to come to this conclusion—observation, measurement, experimentation, and repetition. We're sure there was no shortage of volunteers, and she was willing to revisit her conclusions, apparently, since after this cover appeared she hooked up Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas, and—it's rumored—Robert Kennedy. Who says science is boring?
| Vintage Pulp | Nov 22 2017 |
Everybody wants a piece of Mari Atsumi.
The movie Hadaka de Dakko, aka Be Naked premiered in Japan today in 1970, and as you can see from the promo poster, it starred the prolific Mari Atsumi. She made twenty-six films by our count, which means we've talked about her a lot. Here she plays a snack bar employee who dreams of bigger things, and who, along with her friends, try to accumulate 3 million yen they can use to buy a yacht. The reason it's called Be Naked is because every moneymaking scheme hinges on using Atsumi's body. The beauty shop needs her face to draw customers, the gambling house needs her sex appeal for the same reason, and when she becomes an artist's nude model, well, ditto. And in fact, the same can be said of the movie itself, and we're pretty sure its makers knew it too. Want to see more Atsumi? Start here.
| Intl. Notebook | Nov 20 2017 |
Goliath goes miniature with a new collection of vintage erotica.
Nobody makes erotica quite the way Berlin based art book publisher Goliath does. In the past we've featured its erotic photo volumes Private Pornography in the Third Reich, Strictly Bondage, Kinky Bondage Obsession, and Dirty Rendezvous. Now Goliath has a new collection out called Photographia Erotica Historia, a compendium of hundreds of vintage erotic images compiled in mini-book format. It's leather bound, just about three inches high, close to 400 pages in length, and stored in its own snazzy little slipcase.
The miniature format was chosen by Goliath as homage. Mini books were popular in the late 1800s when erotic images needed to be easily concealable. Such items are collectible today, as are the individual studio photos and naturist shots from which much of Photographia Erotica Historia's content is culled. As a bonus you get some drawings and ink renderings to go along with the photos. The version you see above has French text, but the volume is available in five languages, including English.
Goliath publishes an array of material, but its erotic output is our favorite because it makes people challenge their own assumptions about art, sex, desire, and the idea of the past as a place where people were less devoted to matters of the flesh. Spoiler alert: maybe they weren't, as a scan through Photographia Erotica Historia will illustrate. Our previous Goliath books—which we tend to leave laying around when guests come by—have provided endless hours of conversation and entertainment, and we expect this one to do the same.
The miniature format was chosen by Goliath as homage. Mini books were popular in the late 1800s when erotic images needed to be easily concealable. Such items are collectible today, as are the individual studio photos and naturist shots from which much of Photographia Erotica Historia's content is culled. As a bonus you get some drawings and ink renderings to go along with the photos. The version you see above has French text, but the volume is available in five languages, including English.
Goliath publishes an array of material, but its erotic output is our favorite because it makes people challenge their own assumptions about art, sex, desire, and the idea of the past as a place where people were less devoted to matters of the flesh. Spoiler alert: maybe they weren't, as a scan through Photographia Erotica Historia will illustrate. Our previous Goliath books—which we tend to leave laying around when guests come by—have provided endless hours of conversation and entertainment, and we expect this one to do the same.
| Vintage Pulp | Nov 20 2017 |
Nobody wants to be around when the bill comes due.
We've seen a few posters for the Japanese horror classic Jigoku, but never this one. The title is a Japanese word meaning “hell,” and that idea comes across pretty strongly on this bizarre promo. If you haven't seen the movie, it's about a group of people, all who have committed sins of some sort or another, that find themselves in hell. What's that like? Well, there are lakes of pus, pools of boiling water, fields of spikes, etc., as well as numerous baroque tortures, including people buried alive head first up to their ankles, chopped up, torn apart, de-toothed by various brutal means, and worse. In short, the filmmakers showed everything they had the efx capabilities to depict. It must have scared the bejesus out of people, but the movie was so successful it was remade three times. Real film buffs will want to check out the original, which premiered in Japan today in 1960.
| Modern Pulp | Nov 20 2017 |
Another relationship goes sour for Yuki K.
Above is another promo poster with roman porno queen Yuki Kazamatsuri, this time for her film Chijoku no heya, aka Room of Shame. Yuki's cab driver hubby has an accident and becomes impotent, leading to infidelity spiced up with various kinky deviations. You can always count on Yuki to pick the wrong man. Audiences loved her serial predicaments. By the time this effort appeared she was a huge box office draw, as evidenced by the fact that during 1981 and 1982 she appeared on the screen in no fewer than twelve starring or co-starring roles. That's a lot of failed relationships. She later had small parts in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies, and this year appeared in a mini-series. All-in-all a very nice run in show business, still ongoing. Chijoku no heya premiered in Japan today in 1982
Japan恥辱の部屋Chijoku no heyaRoom of ShameKill Bill: Vol. 1Kill Bill: Vol. 2Yuki KazamatsuriQuentin Tarantinoposter artcinemaroman pornopinkunudity
| Vintage Pulp | Nov 19 2017 |
I had new shocks installed, so theoretically nobody outside should be able to tell we're in there humping like beasts.
In Sin on Wheels a virgin moves into a trailer park with her new husband and discovers he and most of the other residents are swingers. He's cheating on her within a week, she's cheating back days later, and pretty soon everyone wants a piece of her wedding cake. Of course, it was always the husband's plan to share his bride, which means the friction, so to speak, derives from her attempts to resist being turned into a trailer park plaything. It's all written from her point of view, so it's basically a male fantasy of a woman's descent into the sexual gutter. This is credited to Loren Beauchamp but it was written by Robert Silverberg. If you're thinking this is somehow a diamond in the rough we'll tell you bluntly it's not distinguishable from most other light sleaze. It's fun and quick, though, with lots of heavy drinking, strip poker, and round robin intercourse. It's 1962 copyright, with Paul Rader cover art of one of his best temptresses, an aspect that contributes to the book's collectibility.
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