 She's not great on her feet but once she's horizontal—watch out. 
We love the dancer on this cover of the 1962 sleaze novel Sex Dancer. We picture her coming out like, “Va-va-va-voom! Boom shakalaka! Wah-wah-waaa—” before remembering she despises her job and shifting into, “Oh, screw this. Just pay me.” Which is the progression most people go through with their jobs. The main character Jean is supposed to be a hell of a lot hotter than the deflated looking figure in the art. The story from the imagination of veteran author Clayton Matthews deals with a woman who headlines the burlesque attraction at a traveling carnival. She wanted to be a star on Broadway, but now must resist pressure from her boss to do more than just dance. It's a ripe concept but goes mostly unrealized, degenerating into a banal love story, as Jean falls for a stunt motorcyclist who's lost his nerve. After a few nights with her, though, he gets back his nerve, his verve, and his swerve, and the two plot a better life. The only question is whether they can get there. We weren't thrilled with this, but it's reasonably well written, so we may try Mr. Matthews again later. The art is uncredited.
 *sigh* This was more fun before the social distancing thing. 
Orrie Hitt turns his sleazolicious talents to the subject of nudism for the succinctly titled Nudist Camp, published by Beacon Signal in 1957. We're treated to the story of an Icelandic immigrant to the U.S. named Della who finds herself needing to earn her keep due to a looming divorce, and turns her patch of rural land into a nudist resort. Problem is her partner in this scheme is secretly planning to photograph the visitors and blackmail them with the prints. When Della finds out, she's aghast, and bends her efforts toward thwarting this rude plan, leading to a scheme to steal the photos and hopefully burn them. Mixed into the intrigue is a bit of romance, and lots of waxing rhapsodic about Iceland and its beautiful women. That part Hitt actually got right. We've been there, and the women do in fact often have perfect ivory skin. Despite these factoids, and the exploration of body-free culture, Nudist Camp is a preposterous tale, uninspiringly told, signifying very little. You know what would have made it a lot better? More nudity. Go and figure. The cover art here is by Bernard Safran, and was adapted from a piece that originally appeared on the front of 1953's Male Virgin.
 You can't keep a good woman down south. 
Another day, another bit of light sleaze. Sherry, written by Hodge Evens and published by Beacon Signal in 1961, tells the story of a naive young woman who takes a trip south of the border to Mexico with her boyfriend, loses him, loses her money, and loses reasonable options for getting back to the U.S. after she's mistaken for a prostitute, accused of murder, and pursued by heroin smugglers. She must somehow make it home before she ends up in an Ensenada prison or enslaved, but how, when she's broke and hunted? With the only currency she has, of course. That sounds positively sleaze-packed, doesn't it? But considering the premise, Sherry is pretty chaste. We'll give Evens credit, though—he gets you rooting for his heroine. His name was a pseudonym, it seems, though nobody can say with certainty what his real identity was. It'll probably turn up eventually, though. They usually do. The cover art on this is uncredited.
 If you put your fingers in the honey pot you're bound to make a mess. 
We recently read an essay giving Charles Willeford credit as the man who helped originate the genre of South Florida fiction, a profitable niche occupied by John D. MacDonald, Randy Wayne White, and many other authors. Willeford's 1958 novel Honey Gal, originally titled The Black Mass of Brother Springer, is the story of a writer who gets himself appointed minister of a black church in fictional Jax, Florida. He proceeds to use the position to pile up collection money with the aim of stealing it and running away to New York City with a beautiful local girl, the honey gal of the title.
This book is tricky. It's foremost a drama about a man who wants nothing more than a life of leisure, and realizes he's a natural born con man with the gifts to make his dream come true. But the tale is also improbable enough to come across as a farce, funny in parts, though too racially vicious to be considered a comedy, and satirical in the sense that it paints religion as generally a scam. It's a lot to digest, but even so the book, while interesting, is not what we'd call compelling. Willeford has daring ideas, but those who suggest he deserves consideration as a literary author overlook the fact that his writing is not executed at the highest level.
So we think of Honey Gal not as an overlooked classic, but as a somewhat unusual swindle novel written from the point of view of a religious charlatan. In his efforts to gain trust and accumulate cash, the main character accidentally finds himself in a position where his authority as a man of the cloth could do actual good. But will he let his plans for the sweet life be derailed by the opportunity to help others? Will he cool his ardor for that honey gal? Will he have an epiphany on the road to perdition? Hah. You know better than that. Willeford is an entertaining writer, no doubt. Honey Gal is about as different as genre fiction gets.
 Florida sleaze in the Florida Keys. 
In Offshore Resort, written by Dee Winters and published in 1962, a Key West bartender is enticed into a job on a swanky resort island and finds there's all sorts of sexual mixing and matching going on between its rich denizens, and that he's expected to join the activities as a boy toy. He took the job in the first place to be close to his girlfriend, an unhappily married, idle-rich trophy wife whose husband is a drunken bully. Watching his true love play the perfect wife is hard enough to watch, but the scenario gets more complicated when his neighbor, innocent young Angel, gets a job at the resort too and draws the attentions of the place's worst men. Winters could have gone all sorts of interesting places with this narrative, but reached none of them. Beacon Signal sleaze titles are wildly hit and miss. This one is a miss.
 The author's lack focus will quickly become clear.  
We read Paul Gregory's 1961 sleazer Naked Lens and it was, well, quite disappointing. The cover talks about a character named Alice posing for “those pictures you hear about,” but the book isn't actually about her. It's about a photographer named Mike who wants to transition from news to high art and decides to use any means needed to get there. He takes nude photos of Alice when she's drunk, which for Beacon Books is enough to imply that the story is about her, when in reality she occupies maybe one twentieth of the narrative.
The book is poorly written from start to finish, but the worst part is how Gregory writes dialogue in which characters constantly use each other's names:
“But why, Mike?”
“I don't know why.”
“Well, I want to know, Mike.”
“There's no reason.”
“There's always a reason, Mike, even if you don't realize.”
There's always a reason books are bad, too, even if the author doesn't realize. Laughable dialogue, weak characters, a thin plot, and the empty promise of erotica but no sexual thrills at all. You can skip this one.
 Loyal wife learns that there's nothing like a really good sidepiece. 
This cover for Dominique Napier's 1961 novel House Party, a striking piece of art, was painted by Edward Moritz. We think the woman depicted looks a little like exactly like Diana Dors. The main character Betsy is actually a brunette, but this may be one of those paintings that was made independently of the book. Said book is a pretty well written sexual awakening tale about a woman whose husband doesn't ring her bell, and who blames herself. But during a weekend mansion party on the tony Connecticut seashore a longtime crush makes her ladyparts tingle, and she realizes she's not as cold as she thought. She has misgivings about cheating, of course, but for various reasons the idea of getting a piece of side action starts to sound good. Napier's aspirations are F. Scott Fiztgerald-ish, but the literary heft is lacking. If the erotic amperage had been doubled or tripled we think it would have been a much better book, but still, it was reasonably fun. 
Edit: Correction, this looks a lot like Diana Dors. Check the second photo here. Moritz made his painting's nose thinner, but it's undoubtedly Dors. We had the photo in our website all along, but forgot. That's what happens when you have many thousands of posts.
 Explain shareholder one more time. Who exactly am I holding and what if I don't want to share him? 
This pretty orange cover for Ken Barry's Executive Boudoir is better than average, we think, which is fitting because the book is better than average sleaze. Often these tales are terribly written, but Barry tries and succeeds in building a realistic backstory dealing with a battle over a corporate presidency between a patriarch's inexperienced daughter, Lisa, and Jim, the VP who always expected the role would be his one day. Complicating matters is the fact that the two are in a long term relationship. When Lisa supersedes her ambitious boyfriend he's greatly dismayed, but things go from bad to worse when an oily opportunist begins super seeding Lisa. It turns into musical beds with a big business flavor, but some fairly realistic emotion to carry the concept off. The book's main flaws are its presumption that women can't run businesses, and its stupidly pat ending. But you can't ask for too much in this genre. It works fine, for the most part. The copyright on this is 1962 and the cover is uncredited.
 There are some places even sleaze novels shouldn't go. 
Above you see a cover for Din Andrew's 1965 novel Big Orvie. All the other websites we've visited have this art as by an unidentified person, but all the other websites have a slightly different cover (which we posted below) on which the woman is wearing a longer dress, the sky has an impressionist texture, and—crucially—the signature is simply missing. Our version is signed at bottom right by Clement Micarelli. Look there in the tree bark. See it? So we can officially rescue this from the unidentified bin. We always planned to share more art from him. Having found something not previously known to have come from his brush is a nice bonus. Our work is done for today.
On second thought, maybe not. There's the actual book to consider, isn't there? Was it banned at any point? Probably not, but we have to wonder. We expected Big Orvie to be lightweight sleaze. How foolish of us. This countrified taboo smasher dealing with a mentally disabled and oversexed bumpkin named Orville Stroup goes beyond mere sleaze. Some might even call it irresponsible, with its unflinching (but mercifully brief) forays into pedophilia. In fact, it's a book that, assuming its contents were widely known to the general public, you'd have a hard time explaining to your friends why you have it. Consider yourself advised. Now our work is done. 
 Unless that's a tube of sunscreen in your swim trunks, your reaction to seeing a nude sunbather is wildly inappropriate. 
Imagine a beautiful woman coming naked out of the ocean like a water nymph. Sounds like the ultimate male fantasy, right? She doesn't even mind you ogling her like a perv. But after she's gone not only doesn't anyone believe you ever met her—they all think your insistence that you did signifies the onset of mental illness. Is Girl on the Beach sleaze? Romance? Actually, when it finally gets around to a tangible plot it turns out to be a mystery having to do with high end art collecting and a painting that might be worth a fortune. The fact that the lead character is a famous painter, now inspired by the beach girl to new heights of creativity, is a sly lead-in to the book's crime element. We certainly appreciate author Max Day's effort to do something different, but we wouldn't go so far as to call the result good. Extra points for taking a road less traveled, though. The copyright on this is 1960 and the cover is uncredited.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1927—Mae West Sentenced to Jail
American actress and playwright Mae West is sentenced to ten days in jail for obscenity for the content of her play Sex. The trial occurred even though the play had run for a year and had been seen by 325,000 people. However West's considerable popularity, already based on her risque image, only increased due to the controversy. 1971—Manson Sentenced to Death
In the U.S, cult leader Charles Manson is sentenced to death for inciting the murders of Sharon Tate and several other people. Three accomplices, who had actually done the killing, were also sentenced to death, but the state of California abolished capital punishment in 1972 and neither they nor Manson were ever actually executed. 1923—Yankee Stadium Opens
In New York City, Yankee Stadium, home of Major League Baseball's New York Yankees, opens with the Yankees beating their eternal rivals the Boston Red Sox 4 to 1. The stadium, which is nicknamed The House that Ruth Built, sees the Yankees become the most successful franchise in baseball history. It is eventually replaced by a new Yankee Stadium and closes in September 2008. 1961—Bay of Pigs Invasion Is Launched
A group of CIA financed and trained Cuban refugees lands at the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro. However, the invasion fails badly and the result is embarrassment for U.S. president John F. Kennedy and a major boost in popularity for Fidel Castro, and also has the effect of pushing him toward the Soviet Union for protection.
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