Pablo Escobar: Drug Lord & Book Publisher?

by Stephen J. Gertz

Quick - you've just been incarcerated in La Cathedral, a maximum-security prison in Colombia built to your exacting specs so your accommodations are deluxe. You were the world's most notorious cocaine trafficker, head of the Medellin Cartel, but now you're all dressed-up with no place to go. You don't want anyone to forget your infamy. What's a coke kingpin to do?

Publish a book.

Frontispiece.

In 1992 Pablo Escobar did just that. Pablo Escobar Gaviria en Caricaturas 1983-1991 is his self-published valentine to himself, a vanity publication containing 352 political cartoons, photographs, and drawings (four in color) that originally appeared in Colombian newspapers.

Printed on June 2, 1992, it was limited to a small number of copies, the exact number unknown. It's full calf binding was graced by Escobar's facsimile signature and fingerprint on the front cover. After Escobar's escape from the lap of penal luxury a month later, in late July, 1992, his family, for reasons unclear, burned the print run. It appears that only a handful have survived, perhaps ten copies at most. It has become quite scarce.
 

But in a reminder that price is tied to market demand and not necessarily an item's rarity, the offering price on this book has ranged from the ludicrously absurd to the possibly reasonable. Two sellers on eBay - a site that has legitimate and knowledgeable rare booksellers yet is tainted by so many amateurs who have little idea of what they're doing and no feel for the market - offered copies at $60,000 (November, 2012) and $107,000 (February, 2013). PBA Galleries offered a copy in June, 2012 that was estimated to sell for $10,000 - $15,000.

The market spoke and it said (with Jamaican accent), "Have you lost your mind, Mon?" No surprise: they did not sell.

The eBay sellers had no excuse. PBA Galleries' initial auction page remains online with results posted (the lot in question, #94, excluded from the list, indicating no sale). The eBay offers were pure fantasy based upon a crackpipe dream. With no prior auction sales to compare to, PBA's estimate was, if too high, at least serious and down to earth, professionally evaluated, and within the realm of possibility based upon its staff handling thousands of rare books each year and knowledge of categories and their collectors.

Sanity prevailed when James Cummins Bookseller offered a copy two weeks ago for $5,000 and it immediately sold. The market found the price. The eBay copies possessed either Escobar's signature or the original publisher's box (as did the PBA copy), which, the dealers claimed, merited their grandiose, coked-up to the gills prices. (Why $107,000? Why not $100,000 or $110,000?).

A  low ($5,000, Cummins) and high (<$10,000, PBA) value has now been established. We can safely presume that the bidding at PBA began at around $9,000 and there were no takers. The reserve was likely around the same and it was not met. The copies offered on eBay are now worth approximately $5,000 - $8,750, if, of course, there's someone else in the world who cares enough to fork over that sum. That estimate will rise, of course, if demand exceeds supply. It will decline, naturally, if collectors collectively shrug their shoulders.

What the eBay dealers didn't understand because they did not know the market, was that the one person in the world who was a keen collector of drug-related literature, a completist who wanted everything in his area of collection, and, significantly, possessed fabulous wealth, had died in 2011. But Julio Santo Domingo was no fool and would have laughed at the eBay prices; he knew the marketplace. Hell, he was the marketplace for drug-lit., dominating it for the last fifteen years of his life. Escobar's book is interesting but not that interesting, at best a bizarre curiosity, and most, if not all, active collectors of drug literature do not have the scratch necessary to buy at exorbitant prices no matter how scarce the volume. You can't price books in a vacuum; offers have to reflect market realities. There is no such thing as intrinsic monetary value to any collectable, only what collectors are willing to pay and they rule the market. If viewers of Antiques Roadshow have learned anything it is that the rarest anything in the world is well-nigh worthless if nobody cares about it.

Pablo Escobar, whose fortune was once estimated in billions of dollars, would have been thrilled to learn that his book was offered at $107,000. Then, after coming down from the coke high, he would have been depressed when a copy actually sold for only a measly five grand. The market spoke and it said, tu libro es agradable, pero no es para tanto, mi amigo. Lo siento.

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GAVIRIA, Pablo Escobar. Pablo Escobar Gaviria en Caricaturas 1983-1991. [Medellin, Colombia: Pablo Escobar,  1992]. First (only) edition, unknown limitation. Large quarto ( (9x7¾ in); 230 x 200 mm). [2] - 377, [1] recto-only pp. with 13 leaves of prologue and text, 8 leaves of photographs and portraits, 352 leaves of political and caricature, four in full color. Original padded calf with facsimile signature and fingerprint in gilt. Housed in the publisher's box.

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Books, Drugs, and Wallpaper

by Stephen J. Gertz

Struggling booksellers seeking new ways to broaden their client base and increase profits may wish to follow the model of F.W. Richter, who, in 1907, advertised in Tried and True: a Collection of Approved Recipes, a cookbook by the Trinity Church of Niles, Michigan issued by the Mennonite Publishing Co. of Elkhart, Indiana.

Like a wise investor, he held a diversified portfolio of inventory just shy of you name it. When book sales were down he could leverage the loss against sales of drugs, art, stationary, wallpaper, spices and extracts.

He even had promotional glass bottles made, a masterstroke as bookmarks are throwaways but bottles are forever and useful, particularly for storing pure extract of book while broadening brand awareness.

In 1907, nostrums containing heroin, morphine, and cocaine were readily available (though by then regulated) in drug stores. Considering that many of us believe that books produce a euphoric altered-state the retailing of drugs and books in concert, though cross-addiction a distinct possibility, makes perfect sense.

Not sure about the wallpaper, though.

Stacked paperback wallpaper from Anthropologie.

Unless it's book-oriented. Then, like Daniel, you can read the writing on the wall in the comfort of a den, "Mene, Mene, Tekel, u-Pharsin," y'know what I mean? Probably best, though, to keep the lions on a short leash, fed and sated.

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Mennonite Publishing Company, 1886.

The Mennonite Publishing Company existed from 1875-1925. "The Mennonite Publishing Company did an outstanding service in its book and periodical publications both in German and English, serving not only the Mennonites and Amish Mennonites but also a large block of the Russian Mennonite immigrants, particularly in Manitoba. For the latter group it published the Mennonitische Rundschau and hymnals, catechisms, and confessions of faith" (Mennonite Encyclopedia, Vol. 3, p. 634).

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Bottle image courtesy of Bibliophemera, with our thanks.

Image of Mennonite Publishing Company courtesy of Gameo, with our thanks.
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A Notorious Book Condemned by the United States Congress

by Stephen J. Gertz

I, your merry gondolier through the murky waters and curious byways of literature that flow beneath the  bridge of dreamy sighs, bring to your attention, strictly as a caveat lectorem public service, a forgotten classic of 1950s sensationalistic narcotics paranoia and lurid drug eroticism so notorious that it drew the attention of United States Congressman Ezekiel C. Gathings (D-Arkansas) and the House Select Committee  on Current Pornographic Materials, Investigation of Literature Allegedly Containing Objectionable Material of 1952.

After spraying paraquat on Marijuana Girl, a paperback original by N. R. De Mexico (Robert Campbell Bragg, 1918-1954, a member of Anaïs Nin's poetry and erotica-writing circle in NYC), the Committee needled the following opus:

A “book which may be considered another Manual for the Guidance of Potential Dope Addicts is Lady of the Evening by Les Scott. The author does mention some of the evils of drug addiction but probably only as a screen to cover his emphasis of its delights. One chapter… is certainly a glorification of the ecstasies to be derived from marijuana cigarettes…There is also a chapter which describes ‘queer’ life in Greenwich Village, with a pseudo-philosophical discussion of homosexuality, both male and female” (House Select Committee  on Current Pornographic Materials, Investigation of Literature Allegedly Containing Objectionable Material, 82d Congress, 2d Session, 1953, House Report 2510, p.16). 

In sum, if not insane, a sultry dame seduces the male protagonist to join her in heroin addiction; household Hints From Heloise in Hell. Soon, he accompanies her to a dope-soaked orgy hosted by a lesbian junkie-pusher. Later, she takes him on a walking-working tour of a shooting-gallery. Later still, dope-crazy Heloise  rushes headlong toward plate glass to swan dive off a balcony yet behold! she is forcibly prevented from becoming a splattered junkie lady of the evening on the sidewalk only to wind up a screaming junkie lady of the evening in a straight-jacket.

Preceding Lady of the Evening, Scott's Touchable (1951) limns the cautionary tale of small-town girl Ruth, who loses herself in “The Inferno” (the Big City) where lesbianism, prostitution, degradation, absinthe, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin (here known as “The White Fairy”) find her. It's another don't-miss, over-the-top  pulp fiction portrayal of sex and drugs in post-WWII America. Or, at least, in Greenwich Village,  NYC, where the rest of the country expected this sort of activity and got a contact high reading about it.

("Robert W. Tracy," co-author of Touchable, was the pseudonym of Alvin Schwartz, whose enduring fame is as one of the early writers for Batman and Superman comics during the 1940s - he wrote the first Superman comic to feature Bizarro - and who, later, during the 1950s, wrote for Aquaman, The Flash, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman before moving to Canada in 1968 to write documentaries).

Of Scott's Twilight Woman (1952), its dust jacket's blurbmeister  writes, "Tom Grant was convinced that Iris had everything a woman needed. Only she wouldn't marry him. Why? Iris maintained that a woman of the twilight was not good wife material. Grant was convinced she would be better than the woman he had married, Bertha, his ex-wife. Bertha, utterly beautiful, utterly alluring, utterly frigid, but whose white body still held a terrible fascination for him"

"Of course that was before Bertha met Anthony Amato. And then there was red-haired Natalie Jarvis, the estranged wife of a friend. Not to mention Audrey, who 'did her part to keep the kettle bubbling'" (Howard Prouty, ReadInk). Busy Bertha's kettle bubbles bisexually and, by the way, Iris is an "ambisextrous hellion."

A look at the imprint's endpapers tells quite a tale. It's the story of "sophisticate," here a code-word for "adult content," as if the illustration didn't countersink  the nail. "Arco Sophisticates" set  sophistication back a century but made up for it with some of the wildest, most lurid pulp fiction in hardcover you'll ever come across.

Not quite so, however, the many books by Jack Woodford, the 30s-40s screenwriter and author of soft-core pulp, that Arco published. A successful, unpretentious ham n' eggs writer, Woodford wrote a few no-nonsense writing instructional books that get right down to the pith: “One of your first jobs, as you write for money, will be to get rid of your vocabulary.” “Money talks. And writes. And publishes. And reviews. But it can't read.”

Illiterate legal tender aside, the road to Arco Sophisticates begins at  Jack Woodford Press, an imprint established in the late 1940s and edited by two characters with experience publishing and retailing sex lit., Allan Wilson and Moe Shapiro, that the authorities kept their eyes on; it was a division of Citadel Press, which had a reputation for publishing Leftist and erotic literature, and Woodford had been on  the censors' radar for years. Jack Woodford Press reissued many of Woodford's books from the 1930s. By the early  1950s, however, Woodford was an angry alcoholic who felt taken advantage of.

"What Woodford really wanted was to find a publisher with whom he might make more money in royalties and over whom he might exercise more control.

"He had no trouble finding one. During 1951 and 1952, the Arco Publishing Company [established in 1937] issued between seven and twelve novels cowritten by Woodford, as part of their ‘‘Arco Sophisticates’’ series. Milton Gladstone, its founder, had made a publishing breakthrough with a book on how to study for the Army tests, and followed with others in the ‘how-to’ genre. He did not publish much fiction, but obviously Woodford was too tempting to pass up. There were several other writers in the series whose titles, styles, and themes imitated Woodford’s.

"The print runs were approximately 7,000; if Woodford’s contract was like that of other writers, he got an advance of $500 a book, and 50% of all subsidiary rights. In 1952, Gladstone was subpoenaed by the Gathings Committee, and reprimanded for several of the ‘Sophisticates’ because they touched on nymphomania, drug use, gambling, and 'perversions.' One committee member felt he could not even mention many of the titles (Carnal Cargo? Hot Star?); they were 'filthy' and ‘terrible’ (US House of Representatives 230; ‘News of the Week’ 2318). It may have been such pressure that made Gladstone stop issuing the ‘Sophisticates’ line" (Gertzman, Jay A. The Jack Woodford Press: Bestsellers at the Army Base, the Drug Store, and the Tourist Bookstore, 1946–1959. Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 40, Issue 1, February 2007,  pp 25–48).

Without putting too fine a point on it these titillating novels were not sold in mainstream book shops. In addition to drugstores,  Army bases, chain and department stores, typical retail outlets included urban tourist-tenderloin district, i.e. Times Square, NYC, bookstores.

Gladstone sold Arco Publishing Company to Prentice Hall, a division of Simon & Schuster, in 1978.

It would be a grievous omission to not take note of another of Les Scott's books,  Twilight Women.  “The story of a strange love cult and its secret rites! Rance finds himself in the midst of its wild, sensuous members. Trouble. To love them meant not only violating their society’s moral code but punishment by death.” Great cover art (alas, uncredited) illustrates a nude Betty Page-lookalike with a towel draped over her lap and a tree branch masking her breasts. Given the subject matter of Twilight Woman, the secret rites of the strange love cult in Twilight Women will come as no surprise. It's a fun, camp read.

Leslie Scott (1893-1975) was a prolific writer of pulp westerns with over 250 titles to his credit. Why he decided to rip the canvas off the Conestoga wagon to expose the shocking, sordid shadow-world of modern sophisticates remains a mystery but I suspect a shift in the marketplace led him to trade  gingham for sheer gowns.

That shift was quite specific. 1951-1952 heard the roar of anti-drug hysteria over a drug epidemic that did not exist, whipped up by the media after the Kevauver Crime Committee declared organized crime's involvement with the drug trade as "a frightening menace to the youth of America." Suddenly, dope-themed novels became hot-sellers, particularly in paperback. "Murder, rape, kidnapping speedily went out of style as first-choice plot material" (Gerrity, John. The Truth About the Drug Menace. Harper's, February 1952, p. 27, as cited in my Dope Menace).

I did not presume that Leslie Scott and Les Scott were one and the same person simply because the Library of Congress catalogs their books together so I contacted his son, Justin Scott, who confirmed that Les Scott was, yes, Leslie Scott of pulp western fame.

"He did indeed write Lady of the Evening, Touchable, and Twilight Woman. They were handsomely produced books. I've misplaced my copies, they're around the house somewhere I am sure - and I have fond memories of reading them when I was a child."

Yikes! Call retro-Social Services.

"As for reading the 'lurid,' I was a very lucky kid, because my father conveyed the fact - not often stated in those days - that men and women were equal partners in bed."

Cancel that call.

As for Lady of the Evening getting the third degree glare from Congress, he proudly states, "I cannot think of a higher compliment to my father's work."

It is unfortunate that few, beyond the dweeb writing this post, read United States Congressional Committee reports in search of book reviews. Had the Gathings Report been widely read by the general public I suspect that Lady of the Evening might have become a best-seller.

Lady of the Evening is an essential addition to any collection of drug literature, Touchable a tempting elective. 
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SCOTT, Les. Lady of the Evening. A New Arco Sophisticate. New York: Arco Publishing Company,  n.d. [1952]. First Edition. Octavo. 176, [6, as publisher's catalog] pp. Pale green cloth, red lettered. Illustrated endpapers. Dust jacket. 

SCOTT, Les and Robert W. Tracy (pseud. of Alvin Schwartz). Touchable. A New Arco Sophisicate. New York: Arco Publishing Company, n.d. [1951]. First Edition. Octavo. 184, [6, as publisher's catalog] pp. Gray cloth, red lettered. Illustrated endpapers. Dust jacket.

SCOTT, Les. Twilight Woman. A New Arco Sophisticate. New York: Arco Publishing Company, n.d. [1952].  First edition. Octavo. 175, [6, as publisher's catalog] pp. Black cloth, silver lettered. Illustrated endpapers. Dust jacket.

SCOTT, Les. Twilight Women. New York: Beacon B-156, [1957]. 16mo. 186, (5) pp as adv. Illus. wrappers. First Edition, first printing, a paperback original. For some unexplained reason, some date this book to 1952. As Beacon did not begin publishing until 1954 this is clearly a mistake  easily avoided by consulting one of the many paperback reference works.

The Library of Congress' catalog of books by Leslie Scott/Les Scott can be found here.
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Images from the author's collection, with the exception of Twilight Woman courtesy of ReadInk, with our thanks.

Thank you to Justin Scott.

A tip o' the hat to William Dailey for permission to plagiarize my catalog notes from yesteryear.

Special, impossible without him thanks to my friend and colleague in crime and publishment, Jay A. Gertzman, whose only connection to Stephen Jay Gertz is our mutual interest in erotica, the book trade, and censorship, fostered through my uncle and one of his mentors, Elmer Gertz, one of the great 1st Amendment/civil liberties attorneys in the United States during the 20th century.
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Incredibly Scarce Cocaine Magazine (1925) and Marihuana Matches (1937)

by Stephen J. Gertz

Kokain. Eine Moderne Revue. Heft (Installment) 2. Wein: 1925.

It is amongst the rarest of all items of drug literature, virtually unknown to scholars and collectors until now. It is Kokain Eine Moderne Revue, a literary journal published in Vienna 1915-1925. Only five issues were published. Little, at this time, is known about it beyond that gleaned from the issues under notice.

Kokain. Eine Moderne Revue. Heft (Installment) 4. Wein: 1925.

Edited by Fritz Bauer, about whom I've yet to discover anything (he was not the notorious Nazi jurist),  Kokain featured many contributions by women, and was highlighted by the cover art, graphic design and erotic lithography of Stefan Eggeler. Issue #3 was, apparently, confiscated by the Viennese authorities because one of the stories within, Im Kellerloch (In the Cellar Hole) by Erwin Stranik (1898-?; OCLC notes twenty-three titles by him), contained a particularly graphic description of a sexual act. The story was republished in issue #4 (above) along with an essay by Stranik, Was ist Kunst und was ist Pornographie? ("What is Art and what is Pornography?"),  discussing the affair.

What is particularly interesting about Kokain Eine Moderne Revue is that it not only provides further evidence that Weimar culture was lively indeed but, more to the point, its introduction, in 1915, preceded by three years the post-WWI establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1918. As such, Kokain Eine Moderne Revue can justifiably be considered an early, if not the earliest, hint of what was to come, an inspiration, perhaps, for the most libertine and decadent period in Western culture during the twentieth - or any other - century, the defeat of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires in the most violently cataclysmic war yet fought leading to  the collapse of traditional values and the fatalistic pursuit of  desperately carefree, unrestrained pleasure, the Jazz Age in overdrive.

OCLC/KVK locate only two copies of any issues of Kokain Eine Moderne Revue, at the Landesbibliothekenverbund Ostereich, and Verbundkatalog HeBIS, Hessen.
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BAUER, Fritz, (editor) and Stefan Eggeler (artist). KOKAIN. Eine Moderne Revue. Heft 2 and 4. Wein, 1925. First (only) editions. Quarto. #2: [3]-73, [1] pp. #4 (irregularly bound and paginated): [3]-18, 51-66, 35-73, [1] pp. Illustrated wrappers. Text in German. With numerous black & white and color lithographs. With Library of Congress duplicate stamps (yet no copies located in LOC).
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03/29/2011. We have received the following information about Stefan Eggeler from our colleague Elmar Seibel, of Ars Libri Ltd:

"An Austrian painter, printmaker and illustrator, Stefan Eggeler (1894 – 1969) studied art at the Vienna Academy. His first original etching was published in 1914 and during the following twenty years he created a number of outstanding engravings and etchings, most dealing with either figure studies or interior scenes.

"He was a fairly prolific Austrian illustrator of erotic and particularly sado-masochistic books and portfolios. Years & years ago, we had a whole archive of his, possibly from the library of Erich von Kahler; he might have been a friend of Lily von Kahler’s [Erich's wife, aka Alice]. All very odd bunnies. Sort of like Rudolf Jettmar."

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Attention children: Don't play with matches. Particularly these.

Assassin of Youth Matchbook, 1937. Front.

Assassin of Youth Matchbook, 1937. Rear.

The producers of Assassin of Youth, the classic 1937 anti-marijuana exploitation film directed by Elmer Clifton, didn't miss a trick to ballyhoo the movie. Here, they provided an ingenious, if not diabolical, way to promote it with every strike of a match to light legal cigarettes, customized for local theaters.

Assassin of Youth Matchbook, 1935. Inside.

Per usual, the anti-drug message is contradicted by a powerfully overt erotic charge. Sex sells. And sex sells illegal drugs.
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These images make their Internet debut on Booktryst and are courtesy of Between the Covers, with our thanks. The two issues of Kokain immediately sold for $1200 and are now part of the R.K. Siegel Library of Drug Literature. The Assassin of Youth matchbook also sold within moments of being offered, selling for $250; later reprinted, genuine examples in such fine condition are rare.

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Anyone in the U.S. or Europe with further knowledge of Kokain. Eine Moderne Revue, Fritz Bauer or Stefan Eggeler is encouraged to contact me. The hunt for other issues begins.

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