 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.
 What do you call forty dead men? A good start. 
Two years ago we shared five covers of women standing over men they had just killed and mentioned that there were many examples in vintage cover art of that particular theme. Today we’ve decided to revisit the idea in order to reiterate just how often women in pulp are the movers and shakers—and shooters and stabbers and clubbers and poisoners and scissorers. Now if they do this about a billion more times they’ll really be making a difference that counts. French publishers, interestingly, were unusually fond of this theme—so egalitarian of them. That’s why many of the covers here are from France, including one—for which we admit we bent the rules of the collection a bit, because the victim isn’t dead quite yet—of a woman actually machine gunning some hapless dude. But what a great cover. We also have a couple of Spanish killer femmes, and a Dutch example or two. Because we wanted to be comprehensive, the collection is large and some of the fronts are quite famous, but a good portion are also probably new to you. Art is by the usual suspects—Robert Maguire, Barye Phillips, Alex Piñon, Robert Bonfils, Robert McGinnis, Rudolph Belarski, et al. Enjoy.
                                     
 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.
 But he wasn’t all bad. Before him I had a pimp named Cletus and he was really terrible.  
Cough, cough, hack, wheeze. We’re back from oblivion. Above you see the front and rear covers of Joe Castro’s Satan Was My Pimp, 1964, from Playtime Reading, with art by Robert Bonfils. This is of course one of the great sleaze titles ever.
 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.
 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.
 Mr. Bonfils goes for Washington. 
According to Robert Bonfils’ website this is an example of his early work. We find it surprising, but there can’t be a more authoritative source (though that source has been neglected for years). Anyway, since the last Bonfils pieces we showed you were quite racy we thought we’d present his other side. This cheerful and classy LP sleeve for Dinah Washington’s Blazing Ballads is from 1952.
 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.
 Eyes still closed? Good. Remember I said I brought something special for you to eat? Okay, open your eyes. 
This none too subtle paperback front comes from Robert Bonfils for 1969’s The Pink Box, published by Greenleaf Classics for its Candid Reader line, and credited to imaginary house author John Dexter so as not to incriminate the guilty party. What we like most about this cover is how half of it is taken up by a featureless white blanket. It’s almost as if Bonfils painted the fun part, then shrugged and said, “Eh, that’ll do.” We agree. It does just fine.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1926—Aimee Semple McPherson Disappears
In the U.S., Canadian born evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson disappears from Venice Beach, California in the middle of the afternoon. She is initially thought to have drowned, but on June 23, McPherson stumbles out of the desert in Agua Prieta, a Mexican town across the border from Douglas, Arizona, claiming to have been kidnapped, drugged, tortured and held for ransom in a shack by two people named Steve and Mexicali Rose. However, it soon becomes clear that McPherson's tale is fabricated, though to this day the reasons behind it remain unknown. 1964—Mods and Rockers Jailed After Riots
In Britain, scores of youths are jailed following a weekend of violent clashes between gangs of Mods and Rockers in Brighton and other south coast resorts. Mods listened to ska music and The Who, wore suits and rode Italian scooters, while Rockers listened to Elvis and Gene Vincent, and rode motorcycles. These differences triggered the violence. 1974—Police Raid SLA Headquarters
In the U.S., Los Angeles police raid the headquarters of the revolutionary group the Symbionese Liberation Army, resulting in the deaths of six members. The SLA had gained international notoriety by kidnapping nineteen-year old media heiress Patty Hearst from her Berkeley, California apartment, an act which precipitated her participation in an armed bank robbery. 1978—Charlie Chaplin's Missing Body Is Found
Eleven weeks after it was disinterred and stolen from a grave in Corsier near Lausanne, Switzerland, Charlie Chaplin's corpse is found by police. Two men—Roman Wardas, a 24-year-old Pole, and Gantscho Ganev, a 38-year-old Bulgarian—are convicted in December of stealing the coffin and trying to extort £400,000 from the Chaplin family. 1918—U.S. Congress Passes the Sedition Act
In the U.S., Congress passes a set of amendments to the Espionage Act called the Sedition Act, which makes "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States government, its flag, or its armed forces, as well as language that causes foreigners to view the American government or its institutions with contempt, an imprisonable offense. The Act specifically applies only during times of war, but later is pushed by politicians as a possible peacetime law, specifically to prevent political uprisings in African-American communities. But the Act is never extended and is repealed entirely in 1920.
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