Tuesday, September 14, 2010

The Sinsational Vintage Porn Novel About the Rare Book Trade

[HUNTER, Evan]. JUDSON, Dean. Sin Dealer.
N.p. [Chicago]: Pillar Books [Greenleaf Publications] PB 813, 1963.
Cover by Harold W. McCauley.
From Books to Boudoirs!
 Luscious Leigh Wentworth was an expert at selling the valuable tomes in her store and adding to her volumes of forbidden experiences in her sin-scented bedroom! The price was high - in money for the books and in evilly twisted misbehavior for her body...but men laid it on the line when she showed them the passion-slaking delights of the merchandise she had to offer! Then she took Chris McNeill from Skid Row to make him her loot-and-lust partner...and the books began to balance in unexpected ways as he produced new satan-inspired tricks to match every one in her torrid library!
“Shrewd businesswoman and wanton lover...wrap them up in one voluptuous package and you have Leigh Wentworth, who knew the right price for rare books and her own ripe body (Wrapper blurb).

Rare book dealers and collectors, how often has this happened to you?:

Down on his luck and further down on his bank account, Chris McNeill goes into Wentwroth’s rare book shop in Manhattan with a pile of books to sell, she offers him $100 for the lot, he pitches a fit:

“’A hundred dollars!’”

Wentworth is a frosted blonde and frostier businesswoman:

“’...Everybody reads a magazine article about somebody who found a Shakespeare First Folio or a Tamerlane and became rich overnight and everybody thinks -’

“’I’m shocked at your offer because I bought these books myself and paid better than twice that amount for each of them. And that was seven or eight years ago. And rare book prices have gone up since that time.'

“’Not in here, they haven’t,’ the girl said. ‘If you really did pay two hundred dollars apiece for these books, you were cheated.’

“’If I was cheated,’ McNeill said, ‘I wasn’t cheated by any fly-by-night outfit on some crummy street somewhere. I bought  these  books  right  here back when Abe Rosenstein  was still running this place.’

“’...Abe Rosenstein is dead...and my price is still one hundred dollars.’”

The above scene is replayed with minor variations in rare book shops throughout the world on a daily basis.

The scene below, just a few paragraphs later, is not:

“”Do I understand that you’re offering me money to make love to you?”

“’Let’s not put it so crudely,’ she said. ‘Let’s just say that I might be persuaded to give you fair value for those books of yours.’

“’Does a drink or two go along with that offer of yours?’

“’I’ve got one of the best-stocked home bars in the city,’ she said.

“’Let’s go,’ he said.”

Thus begins a full-price torrid romance; for you,  20%  trade discount. By the  end of the  story, our rare  book n’ booze  besotted  lovers have  become  partners in Wentworth’s rare book shop and sin! Again, a typical tableau occurring daily in the rare book world.

Sin Dealer by Dean Judson is one of the many soft-core porn novels written by Evan Hunter (b. Salvatore Lombino) during a fallow period before his Ed McBain books took off and he became a best-selling author. It is, as far as I’ve been able to determine, the only porn novel with rare books as a plot-excuse for sheet-salsa.

The book was published by Pillar Books, one of the many soft-core imprints of William Hamling’s (then) Chicago-based Greenleaf Publications. Evan Hunter wasn’t the only up-and-coming author Hamling employed. Greenleaf’s stable of starving, pseudonymous soft-pornsters included Harlan Ellison, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, Hal Dresner, John Jakes, Robert Silverberg, and many more.

This book has been a quiet secret in the trade with only a few insiders aware of its rare book business plot-device. But a rush to scoop up copies will be on, I suspect, when I confide that the book, according to a dependable, anonymous source, was the inspiration for  intra-vehicular activity betwixt and between two members of the trade who had to pull the car over when their call-and-response reading of the book became a little too responsive and called for immediate action.

From incunabula to Sin Dealer, depend on Booktryst for the dirt; we cover the waterfront.
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3 comments:

  1. "the only porn novel with rare books as a plot-excuse for sheet-salsa."

    Not exactly a porn novel, but there's another such 'how's-yer-father' in 'The Club Dumas' by Arturo Perez-Reverte, except the bedroom is too far away (the room next-door) so it's the hurly-burley of the chaise-longue instead.
    A voluptuous blonde seducing a rodent-faced book fixer, trying to separate him from the original MS of chap 42 of 'The Three Musketeers'.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Most rare books dealers you meet at fairs look almost exactly like the woman pictured on the cover. Truly uncanny.

    ReplyDelete

 
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