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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The LSD Library Goes To Harvard

by Stephen J. Gertz

FABRICE, Delphi. L'Opium A Paris.
Paris: La Renaissance Du Livre, 1907.

The Ludlow-Santo Domingo (LSD) Library of rare books, the world's first, largest, and most distinguished collection of the literature of psychotropic drugs, has been placed at Harvard's Houghton Library on long-term loan after extended and highly sensitive negotiations with the family of the late Julio Mario Santo Domingo, Jr (1958-2009), the eldest son and scion to the fortune of Columbian business magnate Julio Mario Santo Domingo (1923-2011) and omnivorous collector of books associated with the 60s Counterculture in the U.S. and Europe.

Sex, drugs, and rock n' roll was not an area of book collecting that the family, particularly his  wife, Vera, from whom he was estranged, found edifying; it was, apparently, a source of embarrassment, and since Mr. Santo Domingo's death the family had worked hard to disburse his collection with discretion through intermediaries who insisted upon the highest degree of secrecy from potential buyers - institutions, dealers, and auction houses - and negotiations with all were, reportedly, difficult.

WILLIAMS, Fred V. The Hop-Heads of San Francisco.
San Francisco: Walter N. Brunt, 1920.

It was, then, something of a shock when Harvard formally and by name announced acquisition of the major part of the Julio Santo Domingo collection - over 25,000 books, manuscripts, works of art, audio recordings, and films - on September 28th of this year. When I inquired close to a year ago while chasing a rumor Harvard refused comment.

As did The Roll N' Roll Hall of Fame and Museum & Library and Archives which coyly responded, "no comment at this time," a non-confirming confirmation that they had acquired a chunk of the collection. And as did every auction house suspected of being involved in negotiations. (A slice of Santo Domingo's magnificent collection of fine erotica and Baudelaire was recently offered by Christie's-Paris without provenance; highly familiar with the collection, I recognized a few singular items). And last year a selection of books on '60s Counterculture from the collection was discreetly acquired by Maggs in London; journalist Susan Halas recently interviewed Carl Williams of Maggs about  Santo Domingo's Counterculture library for Americana Exchange.

FOLEY, Charles. Kowa, La Mystérieuse.
Paris: Editions Pierre Lafitte, 1920.

The cornerstone of the LSD Library - however large just one part of Santo Domingo's huge book collection - was the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library of the literature of psychotropic drugs, which Julio (we knew each other) acquired in early 2002 from its founders and curators, rare book dealers Michael Horowitz and William Dailey, along with Robert Barker and Michael Aldrich  Ph.D, who established the collection in the early 1970s in response to the dearth of historical resources and research materials on a controversial subject at the forefront of public consciousness and discussion. It was, and will now remain, the pre-eminent book collection on the matter.

VAUDÈRE. Jane de la. Folie D'Opium.
Paris: Albert Méricant, n.d. [c. 1910].
Unrecorded; the only known copy.

But before Julio bought the Ludlow, William Dailey (with my assistance as his cataloger/manager) was sending low- to high five figure shipments of drug-related books to Julio's offices in Geneva every other month or so. Julio bought just about anything you offered  related to his area of interest. I recall that, early on, Dailey sent Julio a very long list. He returned it with only a few items checked off. Bill and I were stunned - this was great, gotta-have stuff. It turned out that Julio had merely indicated the books he didn't want - only because he already had copies.

(I think that shipment was worth $88,000; if not, it was another air freight-load to him for that sum - I died a thousand deaths in the course of arranging its pick-up and shipment. After 9/11, moving large quantities of rare books on illegal drugs out of the country actually became easier. By then, the office guys at Swiss Air freight and those on the dock had become old friends of Dailey Rare Books and we were granted "known carrier" status after an airline official took a quick look-see through the shop. Our shipments no longer required time-consuming piece-by-piece inspection and too much paperwork; now, two quick phone calls and a fax).

Julio would visit L.A. once or twice a year and take Bill and me out to lunch. What did we talk about? Uh, books; Julio couldn't get enough of the subject. He was a hip bazzionaire and always appeared in crisp white shirt, pressed faded jeans, sharp blue blazer, and black tassled loafers, a casual ensemble of uncasual quality and cost to the average citizen. He was a rock n' roll jet-setter; he had personal relationships with rock n' roll's royalty and routinely vacationed with them.

Nick Carter Weekly No. 136: Une Fumerie d'Opium. An Anarchist Plot.
New York: Street & Smith, c. 1905. French edition.

Once, while at Dailey Rare Books, I picked up the phone. It was Julio, calling from Geneva, Paris, Berlin, somewhere in Europe. We chatted for a moment then I passed the call over to William.

"Hi, Bill," Julio said, "say hello to Yoko."  Yup, that Yoko. Mick Jagger was also a friend on a long list of luminaries that were his genuine pals.

When I sold my small yet precious collection of drug literature to William Dailey in 1999 it wound up in Julio's collection. When Julio invited me to Geneva to catalog the enormous number of drug paperbacks in his collection (alas, not realized) I looked forward to seeing those old friends.

Feral House, 2008.

When I was preparing my book, Dope Menace (2008), Julio generously opened his collection to me, and had his staff in Geneva - Beatrice Rodriguez, Natasha Antonini, and Flavia Aulieri -  send requested book images for inclusion into DM, which was the first and last volume to cite the Ludow-Santo-Domingo Library as a reference source. Julio was supportive and proud of the project and looked forward to its publication. He was, sadly, extremely ill at the time of the book's release and while I sent him a copy I'm not sure that he saw it before he died.

Dr. [Julius] Cantala.
The Idol: Opium, Heroin, Morphine, and Their Kingdoms.
[N.p.]: Botwen Printing, 1924.

That the Ludlow-Santo Domingo Library is now at Harvard is a relief to those who spent decades assembling its core and those associated with it. We were afraid that the collection would be broken-up and cast to the winds. There is only one other significant collection of this material in the world, in private hands, yet it's a handsome dwarf compared to the LSD. Now, scholars will have access to the finest, broadest, and deepest collection of books, art, and ephemera related to psychotropic drugs on Earth.

I think I speak for all with their hearts in the collection when I thank the family of Julio Santo Domingo, particularly his widow, Vera, for keeping the LSD Library whole and placing it at Harvard, where the collection, once the bastard step-child of the book collecting world - years ago, William Dailey was denied membership in The Grolier Club because of his involvement with the Ludlow - is now recognized for its significance and takes a deserved place of  honor alongside Harvard's other distinguished special collections.

Work and Win No. 275: Fred Fearnot's Trip to Frisco, or
Trapping the Chinese Opium Smuggler.
New York: Frank Tousey, March 11, 1904.

Julio Santo Domingo, Jr.  is surely smiling, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, John Lennon, Brian Jones, Jerry Garcia, Marc Bolan, Nico, Harry Nilsson, Jim Morrison, Elvis, etc. at his side because Julio has no doubt become best friends with all of them. And they're likely talking about this, what the Harvard Gazette called, A Collection Unlike Others.

"We got the sex and drugs," said Leslie Morris, curator of Modern Books & Manuscripts at Houghton Library, of the Santo Domingo Library.

And now, a stately procession of ignoble books of the sort that Julio loved and owned, copies of many now,  presumably, on deposit at Harvard, the most respected institution of higher learning in the world. 

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All images from Dope Menace: The Sensational World of Drug Paperbacks 1900-1975, each, save the cover image, courtesy of the Ludlow-Santo-Domingo Library.

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It's Tuesday, We Pause To Smoke Opium

by Stephen J. Gertz

Oh Stevie boy, the pipe, the pipe is calling... 

Melancholia, catarrh, the weakies, dropsy, hectic fever, hydrocephalus, ague, the King's evil, quinsy, croup, iron-poor blood, neuritis, neuralgia,  that sinking sensation, teething, diaper rash, and the most dreaded of all maladies, mogo-on-the-gogo-go, in concert with an overdose of reality, fantasies of the exotic Orient and infernal pleasures, and a bad case of the blahs have driven me to the pipe this morning.

The pipe, alas, is imaginary. I'm hopelessly addicted to fantasies of smoking opium. The first time I imagined that I was smoking opium it was a moral choice. Now, caught in Lady Opia's soothing yet remorselessly diabolical embrace, it's a medical problem. Fortunately, I'm never at a loss to satisfy my craving; there's no skulking around dark places to get a fix, socializing with the unsavory, nor criminal activity to support the habit. I simply lie down, close my eyes, and I'm in a plush den, a comely young woman attending to my pipe, keeping it full when I'm unwilling to break the spell, fire a neuron and move a flaccid muscle.

This morning, I'm getting off on The Chinese Opium-Smoker, a scarce reformist tract illustrating the horrors of opium addiction. The lithographs are apparently reproductions of  original Chinese wood engravings. Cheery-O: It's the perfect accompaniment to Cheerios; breakfast is our most important meal of the day, and high time for endorphins to make a brain-pleasin' splash.

"The title sufficiently explains the nature of this little publication, which shows by characteristic language and equally characteristic illustrations what the Chinese think about opium are exceedingly effective, not to say touching. We trust the plea of a heathen nation with a Christian one on behalf of first principles of morality will not go long unheeded" (London Quarterly Review, Volume 60, April-July 1883, p. 280).

 

In its first edition, the book is divided into four sections: I. The Chinese Opium-Smoker. Twelve illustrations. II. Opium-Smoking in China Compared with the Drinking Habits of England. III. The Extent of the Evil. IV. England's Responsibility in Regard to the Opium-Smoker.

This post is being written while I'm in a faux opium reverie; it's writing and publishing itself, and I'm basking in the fabulous reviews flooding in from all media. It's the #1 download at Amazon and iTunes. The YouTube video adaptation goes viral, I'm in contention for a Pulitzer Prize, a committee in Stockholm bruits Nobel, I'm Time magazine's Man of the Year, groupies loiter on my doorstep, panting, and Gore Vidal declares, "God, where has this writer been? His words are crystalline blue notes on a suave stave, by turns rapturous nocturne and Dionysian rondo. I feel like dancing cheek-to-cheek with William F. Buckley Jr!" Adulation becomes me, as I become adulation. We're very happy together.

Please don't spoil my imaginary high and bring me down. O-Lan, lose Wang Lung, Pearl S. Buck's the damned  Good Earth,  and prepare a pipe for me and my guests, a plague of locusts descending to devour West Los Angeles. We must welcome them, provide succor, a nice supper, a cigar, and serenity. It's the least that The Chinese Opium-Smoker can do for those who have journeyed so very far. Yes, I feel their buzz.

Cheerio!

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[Chung Ling Soo and Wilfred Partington]. The Chinese Opium-Smoker. Twelve Illustrations Showing the Ruin which our Opium Trade with China is bringing upon that Country. 12 full-page lithographs printed in colours, showing the gradual downfall of a smoker. Descriptive text opposite each plate. 

London: S.W. Partridge & Co. , n.d. [1881].  Third edition. Octavo. Printed wrappers. [15] leaves including 12 leaves of colored lithographed plates, each with descriptive text to facing leaf.

First edition, 1870, with subsequent editions in 1880, 1881, 1900, and 1909. All are scarce, with OCLC recording approximately only fifteen copies of all editions in library holding worldwide

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All images courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, currently offering this title, 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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This is Your Brain on Books

There has been a spate of recent books covering new research upon how our brains work and the human decision-making process. Madeleine Bunting, at the Guardian, nicely sums up the science and its implications. It turns out that just about all of our assumptions about free-will, autonomy, and rationality in our choices and decisions are chimerical.

I was reminded of this just the other day when I received the following note from a close friend and rare book collector with a Ph.D,, and who has been certified as sane. His first note limns an extraordinary find in which serendipity smiled upon him and became a book collector’s manna from heaven.

“The girl on the telephone told me she thought she had an ex-library copy of Haschisch (Yiddish, 1911) by Lemmermayer.* Hard bound without a cover. I described the wrapper with the partially naked Djinn emerging in the smoke of a hookah. She thought she had seen that before and would look around. Inside a storage room on a dusty shelf inside a plastic bag she found five copies with covers in various states of wear and condition. I bought them all for $12. (twelve dollars) each.

“I'm still trapped in the hookah smoke. I'll believe it when UPS delivers the books.

“Yes, I also bought the 1898 German edition (illustrated) to keep it company in my vault.”

Brothers and sisters, in thirty years I have only seen two copies of the Yiddish edition of Lemmermayer’s Haschisch, to the best of my knowledge the one and only drug-themed book ever issued in that mélange of Hebrew and Middle-German. So, I replied:

“Sacred Fornicating Manure! Five copies? $12 each? Max yikes!"

His reposte:

“Five is what she said but I don't know if she was counting the ex-library copy or not. I have sold/traded duplicates in the past but have always regretted it and continue to be haunted by the ‘loss,’ especially as the value has increased more than the interest on my money. I am anal and possessive to a fault. Now that I have [ ]’s collection, with dozens of duplicates, I want to keep everything. I am also so possessed with book scouting and acquisition now that I am seriously considering taking some of my retirement money (it ain't earning much these days) and trying to acquire [ ]’s stuff as it becomes available on the market. “

What is revealing is his firm desire to keep everything – a completist gone off the rails – and his willingness to tap his retirement savings to pursue rare books, thus providing proof-positive that we book collectors are an irrational lot no matter how sharp or wise we think ourselves to be in our acquisitions.

The rationale that his retirement income is not earning enough money and that he may do better by acquiring multiples of every book in every edition in his area of collecting is clearly one based not upon the real world but one of his own creation.

This decision comes from the amygdala, not the prefrontal cortex which, amongst other functions, is supposed to mediate amongst and temper the emotions to assist with executive functions, i.e. decision-making. But this is your brain on rare drug books. Yet it could be any genre of rare book collection. This is where Nicholas Basbane’s Gentle Madness flares into full-blown nuts.
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*Fritz Lemmermayer (1857-1932), Austrian journalist and novelist. The wrapper illustration to this book, as described above, is one of the most striking and evocative that I have ever seen.