| Vintage Pulp | Dec 26 2022 |
I know you're new to this life but I feel you have a lot of untapped potential.
Above: a cover for Toni Adler's Dance-Hall Dyke, 1964, from Playtime Books, with a blurb written by an editor who was the William Butler Yeats of teaser text. It's so good it stands alone as a poem:
The vicious jungle
of lesbian lures
the fickle and the fake
screaming the obscenity
of the passions
while tender lovers
cry for understanding
We may inaugurate a Pulp Intl. awards season just for cover blurbs. We wanted to buy the book despite its rude title, but it was going for more than two-hundred bucks, which meant no sale. The cover art is uncredited.
| Vintage Pulp | Feb 28 2021 |
Whoa! Did I say round heels? I have no idea why I was even looking down there.
We come across the phrase “round heels” in vintage fiction all the time. It cracks us up because it's so rude, so sexist, so steeped in patriarchal double-standard. All of you know what round heels means, right, or did we get ahead of ourselves? Well, if not, it means that a woman will so readily have sex with whoever she meets that she might as well have round heels so she can fall on her back at any moment. She's a pushover.
Returning to that double standard thing, there's actually been a bit of a shift in recent years. Nowadays a woman might call a guy who gets around a fuckboy, which is the only insult referring to male sluttiness that we've ever noticed actually getting under guys' skins. Call him a manslut or a male hussy and he might laugh it off. Call him a fuckboy and he'll actually get angry most of the time. Such are the vagaries of English that if you tack “fuck” onto a term it's a whole new ballgame.
In any case, Lars Raymer's cheapie sleazer Round Heels was published in 1964 by Playtime Books and the art is by the always memorable Robert Bonfils. It also has one of the best cover blurbs we've ever seen: “She was a pushover, the easiest lay in town. Ask her doctor... or better still, ask his wife.” That's really funny. To us, anyway. As a side note, we'd like to add that sexually take-charge women are amazing. If not for you we'd still be playing Dungeons & Dragons on Friday nights. You make every university, nightclub, and church congregation better. Don't change a thing.
| Vintage Pulp | May 19 2011 |
You can’t spell “stud” without STD and you.
Above, a copy of William Spain’s sleaze pulp Dial “S” for Stud, a book so obscure that an internet search yields zero hits. That means, unfortunately, we can’t tell who was the owner of what we suspect is a pseudonym. We even came up blank in the Library of Congress online database. So maybe whoever wrote this disowned it. Probably a good idea. But we’re tenacious, so hopefully we’ll turn up more info later.
