Nothing will work right when he’s done. Remember those alpha covers we talked about in the past? This one can be added to that group. It’s a decidedly threatening tableau, and with the extra element of a tool taking on the role of phallic symbol. Robert Bonfils was behind this one, 1965, for Greenleaf Classics/Leisure.
You know, here they really frown on this sort of thing, but if you really can’t wait… Above, Passion Suburb by Evan Hunter writing as Dean Hudson, published 1962. The suburb in question is called Rustic Acres, and it’s filled with horny women who bed any man who happens along. Or as the local Chamber of Commerce put it on the brochures: If you lived there you’d be boning by now. The cover art is by Harold W. McCauley.
Get back in here you lunatic! You’ll wake the neighbors screaming on the way down. Above, Robert Bonfils at his best, with cover art for Wanton D.O.A. written for Greenleaf Classics’ Leisure imprint by Andrew Shay, 1964.
You know, in my country they’re clear-cutting forests at an alarming rate. Above, Sucked into Sin, written by Curt Aldrich and published by Greenleaf Classics in 1968 for their Companion Books set. Typical sleaze here, with a story revolving around a woman whose husband leaves for Germany on a business trip for three weeks, prompting the horny neighbors to use the time to corrupt her. It doesn’t take much, and within days wifey's letting the whole neighborhood get on it. But what will she tell her husband? The cover artist for this is Ed Smith.
It’s a whole different sport. One way to get the Pulp Intl. girlfriends to watch football with us is to tell them the commentary is full of unintentional sexual terminology. By far the best phrase of last couple of weeks was, “Marcus Mariota had his tight end wide open.” The girls loved that one. Anyway, we wanted to do a sports themed cover, so today you see Don Russell’s Play-Off Partners, published by Greenleaf Classics’ Companion Books imprint in 1969. The art is by Ed Smith.
This? This isn’t the lust lotion. I’ll grab that in a sec. This is my hemorrhoid cream. I’m gonna need your help here. We were going to go with “cream for my seeping bacne” for the subhead on this one, but that struck us as too colloquial, so we went with hemorrhoid cream instead. We’re all class around here. Anyway, Curt Aldrich, who we last discussed way back in 2009, was a house pseudonym inhabited by several writers, so we hear. The only one of those to have been positively identified is Richard Curtis. The Lust Lotion, which appeared in 1967, is a tame effort for Aldrich. He would go on to write incest books like Spread Big Sister and Her Father’s Fixation, as well as bestiality novels like Daughter Loves Horses, Horse-Happy Schoolgirl, and the unforgettable Schoolgirls Hot for Dogs, so Lust Lotion is family fare in comparison. The art is from Robert Bonfils.
Frosty the Snowman was a jolly happy soul, with a corncob pipe and a button nose and a nympho on his pole… Those are the lyrics, right? We can’t remember. You know, maybe humping a snowman is more fun than it looks, but even so, it seems like a good way to find yourself explaining to a doctor—or a gynecologist—how you got the weirdest case of frostbite ever. Don Elliott was a pseudonym used by science fiction author Robert Silverberg, and we can only guess he’s cringed over this one at least once a day ever since he wrote it in 1967. The art is by Tomas Cannizarro.
I haven’t laughed like this since I was the Duchess of Discomfort. Life was so much simpler back then. We love the outrageous art from Greenleaf Classics, which means we always have to circle back to it, this time to the above Pleasure Reader entry Queen of Cruelty, by Donald Westlake writing as Alan Marshall. This appeared in 1967 with Tomas Cannizarro assuming the cover duties. You can see a few of our favorite Greenleaf covers here, here, and here.
Faced with this position surrender is the only option. Here you see a pose that appears over and over in vintage paperback art—one figure looming menacingly in the foreground as a second cowers in the triangular negative space created by the first’s spread legs. This pose is so common it should have a name. We’re thinking “the alpha,” because it signifies male dominance and because of the A shape the pose makes. True, on occasion the dominator isn’t male, sometimes the unfortunate sprawled figure is depicted outside the A shaped space, and sometimes the art expresses something other than dominance, but basically the alpha (see, that just sounds right, doesn’t it?) has been used scores of times with only minor variation. You’ll notice several of these come from subsidiaries of the sleaze publisher Greenleaf Classics. It was a go-to cover style for them. We have twenty examples in all, with art by Bob Abbett, Robert Bonfils, Michel Gourdon, and others.
There’s no way in hell we can publish a sleaze book about the war in Vietnam. Can we? If you ever needed proof no subject was taboo for Greenleaf Classics, this is it. 1970’s Viet-Nookie was written by James L. Brown under his pen name L.J. Brown for Greenleaf’s Candid Reader line, and we can just imagine Greenleaf honchos William Hamling and Earl Kemp going back and forth: “No, we can’t.” “Yes, we can.” “No, we can’t.” "Yes. We can.” More likely, they both thought it was a great idea. Later in 1970 the two would go too far and be convicted of obscenity for distributing a book called Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which was an illustrated send-up of the actual federal report of the same name. But that’s another story entirely. The art here is by Robert Bonfils, by the way, and you can see more of his genius here and here.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1949—Rainier Becomes Prince of Monaco
In Monaco, upon upon the death of Prince Louis II, twenty-six year old Rainier Louis Henri Maxence Bertrand Grimaldi, aka Rainier III, is crowned Prince of Monaco. Rainier later becomes an international household name by marrying American cinema sweetheart Grace Kelly in 1956. 1950—Dianetics is Published
After having told a gathering of science fiction writers two years earlier that the best way to become a millionaire was to start a new religion, American author L. Ron Hubbard publishes Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. The book is today one of the canonical texts of Scientology, referred to as "Book One", and its publication date serves as the first day of the Scientology calendar, making today the beginning of year 52 AD (After Dianetics). 1985—Theodore Sturgeon Dies
American science fiction and pulp writer Theodore Sturgeon, who pioneered a technique known as rhythmic prose, in which his text would drop into a standard poetic meter, dies from lung fibrosis, which may have been caused by his smoking, but also might have been caused by his exposure to asbestos during his years as a Merchant Marine. 1945—World War II Ends
At Reims, France, German General Alfred Jodl signs unconditional surrender terms, thus ending Germany's participation in World War II. Jodl is then arrested and transferred to the German POW camp Flensburg, and later he is made to stand before the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials. At the conclusion of the trial, Jodl is sentenced to death and hanged as a war criminal. 1954—French Are Defeated at Dien Bien Phu
In Vietnam, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which had begun two months earlier, ends in a French defeat. The United States, as per the Mutual Defense Assistance Act, gave material aid to the French, but were only minimally involved in the actual battle. By 1961, however, American troops would begin arriving in droves, and within several years the U.S. would be fully embroiled in war.
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