 I'm pretty sure she doesn't even like me. I think the lockdown is making her do this out of sheer boredom. 
Above, The Girl Takers by Don Holliday, for Greenleaf Classics' Midnight Reader line, published in 1961. Holliday is, as you probably know by now, a house pseudonym used by many. This time it's being inhabited by Arthur Plotnik, who wrote nine other Greenleaf novels. This one deals with a man who descends into increasing depths of so-called depravity in order to experience bigger and bigger thrills. The cover art is by Harold W. McCauley. We'll have more from Greenleaf soon.
 Need a service animal? He's happy to do the job. 
Harold W. McCauley is responsible for this simple but effective cover for 1961's Lover. His image captures the main character Johnny Wells' aura of unhappiness. Johnny is a young New York City hustler who decides to become an uptown gigolo. Starting with a few hundred dollars of ill-gotten gains, he transforms himself into a cultured, hotel-dwelling manhooker who services upper class women. While great at his job, his sexual misadventures take a toll. These include being spurned by a favorite customer who realizes she prefers women, being the unwilling centerpiece of an orgy, and more. The most curious bit is how Johnny's main love interest is a 14-year-old girl from around the way. Author Lawrence Block, hiding behind the Andrew Shaw pseudonym, makes no comment about how strange and possibly illegal this relationship is, and after a while you realize he never planned to. Block can write, so in general Lover reads smoothly, which is about the most you can hope for with this genre. Does that mean it's worth checking out? Well... we wouldn't go that far.
 Baby, I don’t mind you calling my chest an A-cup, but can you stop calling my penis an A-cup too? "You actually make a pretty hot chick,” she says, smiling.
“Why are you smiling?”
“I’m not smiling,” she says, laughing.
“You’re laughing at me.”
“I’m not laughing,” she says, hyperventilating.
“Okay, screw this! I didn’t want to do this anyway!”
 Yeah, wow, nice. I've never seen one without hair. It's slick as a— Wait, did you say you tore it out with hot wax? 
Above, the cover of Orgy Man by Dean Hudson, a Greenleaf Classics house pseudonym used in this case by veteran sleaze author Evan Hunter, writing for Greenleaf's Idle Hours imprint, with cover art by Robert Bonfils, copyright 1964. Hah. We did that all in one sentence.
 I don't understand your reluctance to do me in the privacy of my office. Your résumé says you did this guy Chekhov in the park. 
Before we do anything else here are five book covers of women shooting men. And here's a book cover of a woman whipping a man. And here's one of a woman about to stick a gun in a man's mouth. This is just paperback art, which is not to be taken too seriously, but we felt we needed to de-Weinstein things a bit anyway. So what's going on with this book? A sleazy casting agent named Stirling Steele catches wind of a beautiful singer and goes to Nashville to promise her anything she wants as long as she ends up naked on her back. Instead he gets arrested for trying to corrupt her morals and finds himself in jail with a friend of his, also a shady agent who'd heard about the singer and shown up in Nashville for the same reason. The jail is run by a hot matron, and there's also a beautiful— Wait. Let's stop. This is silly. The plot doesn't matter at all. Orgy Scouts is so stupid and badly written it isn't even worth summarizing. Why do we torture ourselves with these books, you're wondering? Because we buy them in lots, and others in the group promise to be better. We'll see. This one is copyright 1967 with art by Tomas Cannizarro.
 You're amazing. This whole reputation you have for evil is totally undeserved. Wait, what are you doing? Hey, I can't bre— *glug* 
Another cheapie cover from Greenleaf Classics, Lust Demon by Don Elliott, with a tableau featuring a nipple-less devil woman and her unsuspecting companion. This isn't just any sleaze—it's sleaze by Robert Silverberg hiding behind the Elliott pseudonym. We've read of few of his smut efforts now, and he's better than the average literary perv. That doesn't sound like a compliment, but it really is. 1966 on this with art by uncredited.
 At this rate we're both going to end up getting an F. And not one that stands for anything good. 
We never went to summer school. We just weren't bad enough students for that but now we see it may have had its good points, as seen on this cover for Tony Calvano's, aka Thomas P. Ramirez's Summer Lust, about students in summer session who can't keep their minds on their work. Greenleaf Classics could turn even the most obscure scenarios into sleaze, so you know something as obvious as summer school basically wrote itself. It's copyright 1965, with cover art by an unknown.
 Now I'll show you what we oilmen call directional drilling. 
We always have to circle back to Greenleaf Classics because their covers are so brazenly funny. Oiled for Lust appeared in 1967 with the pseudonymous J.X. Williams credited as author. Many writers used the Williams name, but in this case even the Greenleaf Classics website is stumped as to who the author really was. Slide this into the unknown bin for now.
 I'm getting pretty fed up with your attitude, mister. You should try being as friendly as your wife. 
John Deering meets a sexpot in a bar who offers him employment with her rich aunt. The aunt—this is a sleaze book, so she's a total cougar—is mysterious about the job, but when you send your daughter to find a man in a bar what do you suppose the job will be? The aunt lounges about in bed half naked and tells John she'll pay him just to hang around her mansion, allegedly so she can study him and see if he's the right man for the still unspecified job. It's about at this point that he realizes she has no feet. Which makes this passage rather interesting:
“He could not help noticing that her nightgown was high on her hips. She was exposed to his view. He tried not to look at her cunt, but found it next to impossible not to do so. She has a beautiful body, he thought. She must have been ravishing once, before her accident. She still is, he thought further—no mistake about it. There is nothing about her that repels me, as she feared there might be. I find her damned pleasant to look at—feet or no feet.”
John is finally told about the job. The cougar and her husband can't inherit unless they give the patriarch of the clan a grandchild. Why can't the hubby get the job done? Does it matter? This is sleaze. The only job that truly matters is giving readers boners. John is sexually attracted to the aunt, but also likes her daughter, who's more age appropriate for him. Complications arise, including—gasp!—murder. And that's all we'll say. Except that we really enjoy these silly books. The copyright on this one is 1967 and the art is by Ed Smith.
 This is really fun! After this I'll shave your legs and pluck your eyebrows. 
Above, a cover for Shame Star, copyright 1964, written by Evan Hunter using the pseudonym Dean Hudson for Idle Hours Books. Yep, we read it. It's about a free spirit named Francie Jordan who gets low on money, gets into nude modeling, and ends up involved in the NYC skin flick racket. The cover doesn't depict her, though. For some reason it shows a secondary character enjoying an assisted cleanse in a Japanese bathhouse in Harlem. Maybe someone could ask the artist why he chose that scene, but the cover is uncredited. Overall this is standard sleaze, maybe a hair better written than usual, but nothing we'd recommend.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1963—John Profumo Resigns
British Secretary of State for War John Profumo resigns after the revelation that he had been sexually involved with a showgirl and sometime prostitute named Christine Keeler. Among Keeler's close acquaintances was a senior Soviet naval attaché, thus in addition to Profumo committing adultery then lying about it before the House of Commons, authorities pressed for his resignation because they also feared he had been plied for state secrets. 1939—Journey of the St. Louis
The German passenger liner MS St. Louis, carrying 963 Jewish refugees, is denied permission to land in Florida, United States, after already being turned away from Cuba. Forced to return to Europe, many of its passengers later die in Nazi concentration camps. The event becomes the subject of a 1974 book, Voyage of the Damned, by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, and is later adapted into a film with the same title, released in 1976. 1968—Andy Warhol Is Shot
Valerie Solanas, feminist author of an anti-male tract she called the S.C.U.M. Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men), attempts to assassinate artist Andy Warhol by shooting him with a handgun. Warhol survives but suffers health problems for the rest of his life. Solanas serves three years in prison and eventually dies of emphysema at San Francisco's Bristol Hotel in 1988.
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