Poet & Literary Hoaxster John Glassco On Pornography, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Etc.

by Stephen J. Gertz

 

Scraping the crumbling roadbed of this strife
With rotting fenceposts and old mortgages
(No way of living, but a mode of life),
How sift from death and waste three grains of duty,
O thoughts that start from scratch and end in a dream
Of graveyards minding their own business?

But the heart accepts it all, this honest air
Lapped in green valleys where accidents will happen!

                     — John Glassco, "The Rural Mail"

What distinguishes good porn from bad? Is there an aesthetic of pornography? Are porn novels an essentially romantic genre of literature? What are the true rewards of authorship? Is Margaret Atwood a sexual fetishist? And did Leonard Cohen really want to give up singing and join the Israeli army?

Last year, A Gentleman of Pleasure, literary historian Brian Busby's biography of the enigmatic Canadian poet, memoirist, acclaimed translator of French-Canadian poetry, novelist, pornographer, and literary hoaxster, John Glassco, the self-proclaimed "great practitioner of deceit," was published. Now, Mr. Busby presents The Heart Accepts It All, a selection of Glassco's letters.

Glassco's correspondents included novelist Kay Boyle; poet and novelist, Robert McAlmon; Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias; novelist, poet, and critic Malcolm Cowley; novelist Margaret Atwood; Henry James' biographer, Leon Edel; and many other literary notables, including novelist, literary and cultural critic, and professor, Geoffrey Wagner, who, under the pseudonym, P.N. Dedeaux, wrote a handful of erotic novels in the 1960s and early '70s that remain amongst the best written of the era.

DEDEAUX, P.N. [Geoffrey Wagner]. The Tutor.
Wilmington, Delaware: Taurus Publications, 1970.
Distributed by All America Distributors Corp.
True first edition, reprinted by Venus Library (Grove Press), 1971.

DEDEAUX, P.N. [Geoffrey Wagner]. Tender Buns.
North Hollywood: Essex House #0126, 1969.
First edition.

Glassco, whose Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970) is considered to be the best view of expatriate Paris in the 1920s, had a gift for stylistic imitation. He seamlessly completed Aubrey Beardsley's unfinished erotic novel, Under the Hill (aka Venus and Tannhauser) for Olympia Press in Paris (1959). He wrote the erotic poem, Squire Hardman, which he mischievously ascribed to George Colman the Younger, a once popular British dramatist and writer of the late eighteenth- early nineteenth centuries).

First edition. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970.

He was the author of what is arguably the best-selling, most popular erotic novel in English of all time, The English Governess by Miles Underwood (Paris: Ophelia Press [Olympia Press], 1960) aka Harriet Marwood, Governess, The Authentic Confessions of Harriet Marwood, An English Governess; The Governess; Under the Birch, and who knows how many other reprint titles, a novel so often pirated that it may hold a record in that department, too. Glassco also wrote Fetish Girl by Sylvia Bayer, which he, with a gallant wink, dedicated, "To John Glassco."

He wrote the Introduction to The Temple of Pederasty by Ihara Saikaku, translated by Hideki Okada (Brandon House/Hanover House, 1970). He wrote more than the Introduction.  The book, purportedly based on one by the very real 17th century Japanese poet and novelist, Ihara Saikaku (1642-93), the volume is an grand exercise in literary deception. The translator, 'the late Dr. Hideki Okada,' is actually Glassco himself. Glassco's translation (in his word, "interpolation") is, for the most part, derived from Ken Sato's unintentionally hysterical and inept translation of Saikaku's Quaint Stories of the Samurais, a collection of homoerotic tales published by Robert McAlmon, Paris, 1928.

In Glassco's letters to Wagner he shares his thoughts on literary pornography.

"Ours are only more sophisticated, in better taste, more literate and civilized. In my 'Art of Pornography' I have hazarded a tentative definition of the genre, in so far as it can be considered a branch of literary art, as 'that kind of aphrodisiac writing which, no matter to what sexual disposition of vagary it is addressed, can command the interest of a judicious reader of dissimilar psychosexual disposition.' This rules out all kinds of trash but leans heavily on imponderables. I was simply trying to formulate some definition, to isolate what we know is good pornography (Cleland, Nerciat, Voisenon, Beardsley, Swinburne) from the mass of rubbish like Rosa Fielding, The Lustful Turk, etc. and such dead horses as poor Steven Marcus flogs so pointlessly [in The Other Victorians]. I was subjecting pornography to an aesthetic test: perhaps thereby imposing on it a dead critical hand. - the essential mystery of sadomasochism itself remains dark, and I for one shall never unravel it. All I know is that like all forms of psychosexuality it is auto-erotic, subjective, and the partner sought (and sometimes found, and isn't this a blessing) in real life is only a projection of one's own self. One does find one's alter-ego, as I know; and so does she, and then everything in the garden is lovely, even for years.  The real Luv arrives, and dulls the sharp end of sex, and both go wandering off on their endless quest for variety, separately alas, still seeking some new double version of the self..."

"Dear old Bizarre! It was an oasis back in the dreary fifties. Yes, I remember the wonderful photo of of Mlle Polaris, the Queen of the Wasp-waists, in her extraordinary corset, which John Willie unearthed and reprinted….He was a Pioneer. Though his pony-girl fantasy, in monthly episodes, did get rather tedious: the writing was so amateur…

"Thanks for your suggestion that I send the Governess to the Penthouse Book Society. Alas, I sold all British rights outright, in dear Harriet to one Aaron M. Shapiro of New York for $1,000 down and 50% of everything he can get over this. And notre cher Maurice G. owns the rights to the obscene version. He still owes me $500 (due last July) but what hope. So I am now only an onlooker of the progress of this absurd book. It gives me unexampled delight to see it on drugstore counters and being bought by liplicking trembly-handed gents on Montreal. These are the true rewards of authorship" (Sept 3, 1968).

North Hollywood: Hanover House (Brandon House), 1970.

On April 12, 1970, copies of Glassco's Temple of Pederasty sent to him by the publisher in California were intercepted at the Canadian border, examined in Ottawa, and determined to be "immoral or indecent." On April 24th, Glassco wrote Wagner:

"I just might make an issue of this. I am consulting our great F.R. Scott (Lady Chatterley's Lawyer) about this next week. After all, these 18 free copies are mine by right, aren't they? I'm mad as hell about this virtual confiscation of my proputty."

On June 16, 1971, Glassco wrote Wagner:

"Thank you so much for Gynecocracy [1893] and The Boudoir [1880s magazine]: they are both banned in this moral province [Quebec]. These Victorian things have always had a great appeal to me, largely as period pieces. In spite of or perhaps because of their awkwardness, bad grammar and super-abundance of cliché (descriptively, the girls simply don't exist!), they are still readable and often stimulating. What I find their greatest fault is their lack of verisimilitude, the demands they make on the reader for an utter suspension of common sense, and a certain monotony. But what is most interesting is that their very situations, action and preoccupations are still being reproduced in places like the correspondence column of Justice Weekly: in porno, there is almost nothing new under the sun! - Well, these old books were of course for the most part carelessly and hastily written: Gynecocracy begins rather well but falls down badly about half-way through, with absurdity piled on absurdity as the  author either became tired or lost all sense of proportion. I think you and I have done much better in the genre; the next generation will be reading us, rather than them, I'm sure…Even at that, however, I think we tend to bypass reality rather too much: it's such a temptation to let one's fancy lightly fly! And to pile things on. At least it is so in my case:I've forgotten Horace's ne nimium advice much too often.

"But this raises the whole question of an aesthetic of pornography, the matter of raising it to the plane of art, as Cleland and Nerciat somehow did. Perhaps we should try and forget the Victorians: they are, subtly, too much with us, too sweetly oppresive by reason of their décor, richness and nostalgia. But what milieu, what locus, can take their place? Our art is essentially romantic, and seeks a never-never climate; yet it must, I think, take more account of reality than it has in the past. This means, to begin with, it must have a strong story-line, a good skeleton as it were; it should also be psychologically viable; and should even have a certain moral truth such as it had in the 18th century. Perhaps this involves giving our work a wry, tragic, or unhappy ending. Quite a programme, indeed!"

For all his genius as an editor-publisher, Maurice Girodias was a poor businessman with a casual attitude about contracts and author payments. Everyone who wrote for Maurice Girodias had complaints and Glassco was no exception.

On September 26, 1966 Glassco sent Girodias a postal spear with firm point.

"It has…come to my notice that you have published a book called Under the Birch, using the text of The English Governess, and are apparently selling it in various countries. This is a breach on copyright, since under our agreement of 30 March 1960, you had only the right to reprint The English Governess on payment to me of NF 3000 for each reprint. The new title means a new publication, not a reprint…

"In view of the difficulties I have experienced in the past in ensuring performance of our agreement of 30 March 1960 I am sure you will understand my insistence on payment of the $1000 in Canadian funds within three months of the date of this letter…"

On May 11, 1967, Glassco wrote Girodias again, his spear inspired by Nabokov's Lolita.

"Dear Maurice (if I may):

"I have just been reading your 'Sad Ungraceful Tale of Lolita' in the reprinted Olympia Reader, and was struck by the undoubted fact that Lolita would not, as you point out, heve been published at all; but for you: at which point I realized that this also holds true for Under the Hill, and that my last letter to you was written in an unduly heated state of mind…

"…There is a chance I may be sent to Paris on a government cultural mission in a week or so…I hope then to have the pleasure of calling on you, and talking on all subjects except that of money.

"Yours with kindest regards, John G."

Later in that year, Glassco wrote again to Girodias in response to a request (and Girodias' plan to reprint The English Governess in the U.S. under his Olympia Press- NY imprint). The request remains intriguing:

"Some new Sade translations might be within my powers this winter. My versions would be quite unlike [Austryn] Wainhouse's as to constitute original translation…Sade has a good clear rhetorical style, a little turgid, but full of a life and vivacity which do redeem the dryness and tedium of his philosophical ideas…All the English versions of Sade I've ever seen are quite unworthy of this inspired madman who surpasses St. Francis of Assisi in the scope of his ideas. Sade is the moral Columbus of our epoch."

Margaret Atwood interested in fetishism? Leonard Cohen in the Israeli army?

"June 16, 1971

"Dear Peggy

Thank you so much for The Undergrowth of Literature [by Gillian Freeman, 1967, a survey of sexual fantasy in literature]. I was specially struck by the chapter on rubber fetishism, which I can see is rampant over there [in England]. As a latex fan since the age of 4 (my true Venus has always worn a frogman's suit), I enjoyed it enormously. Also, I had just finished a short novel [Fetish Girl] whose characters wallow delicate in this fetish, and it was encouraging to read about its popularity in the U.K…

"…Leonard Cohen tells me he is finished with Literature and chansonnerie and suggests we both join the Israeli army…"

NY: Venus Library, 1972. First edition.

In 1971 Glasco submitted the first chapter of Fetish Girl to Fraser Sutherland, publisher of Northern Journey, a Canadian literary journal, for publication.

"You may find FG disappointing. But don't forget that this is formula commercial pop-porno, beginning mildly because the action must always be a constant crescendo and all subsequent chapters depend closely on each other, and they can't be isolated. - By the way, FG is the first rubber-fetish novel ever written. [N.B. It was not. That honor lies with Rubber Goddess by Lana Preston (Paul Hugo Little, 1967).

"If you take this chapter - and please feel free to reject it in spite of your kind sight-uneen acceptance! - it must appear under the name of its true author Miss Sylvia Bayer, as the entire book will; nor should any reference be made to its publication this fall by Grove Press [under its Venus Library imprint], since this may invalidate her contract.

"I will send you a recent glossy of myself, and one of Miss Bayer, too…"

"To The Editors Of Northern Journey, July 15, 1971.

Dear Sirs: -

My good friend John Glassco has just told me you have accepted the first chapter of my latest novel Fetish Girl and I am delighted.

I understand you would like to use a photograph and to print some kind of introductory-biographical note.

I enclose the photograph. As for the note here also is a suggested first person text giving all relevant information and you can 3rd-person alter, cut, telescope or rearrange as you see fit. Only I must see the final text of whatever note you mean to use, I'm sorry to put you to this extra trouble, but I have to do it.

Yours sincerely,

Mrs. Sylvia Fenwick-Owen, 1224 Bishop St.,
Montreal 107
P.Q.

P.S. May I beg you to keep my home address quite confidential. Thank you."

Whose photograph did Glassco submit as that of "Sylvia Bayer?" His first wife, Elma. Fraser Sutherland had no idea. Glassco's friends did and were startled.

It remains a mystery just who John Glassco really was. For all the light Mr. Busby has diligently shone on the man, and no matter how revealing his letters, John Glassco remains, however open, charming and generous of spirit - his heart, indeed, accepted it all - something of a puzzle, he seemed to prefer it that way, and he's all the more fascinating because of it. He enjoyed pseudonymity and creating a tall-tale context for his erotica. His pleasure was writer as actor portraying his characters. He was one of Canada's gifts to literature, a gentleman litterateur in a smoking jacket with a talent for literary sex.

__________

Full disclosure: Mr. Busby is a friend, and in the book generously acknowledges the meager assistance I provided by answering a few questions.

__________

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The Most Notorious Publisher In American History

by Stephen J. Gertz

He stood at the crossroads of Modernism and censorship, twentieth century literature, copyright law, and cultural history. He introduced America to James Joyce's Ulysses, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen, Alfred Jarry's The Garden of Priapus, etc. He also published Loose Shoulder Straps by "Alain Dubois" aka poet, litterateur, and author of The Rhyming Dictionary, Clement Wood; Padlocks and Girdles of Chastity by Alcide Bonneau (1928); Sacred Prostitution and Marriage By Capture (1932); Lady Chatterley's Husbands (1931, written by Antony Gudaitis, aka Tony Gud);  and the famed homoerotic novel, A Scarlet Pansy (1932 deluxe issue, by "Robert Scully," almost surely poet Robert McAlmon, with a 1933 trade edition). He edited and published Two Worlds, a hardbound literary quarterly whose contributing editors were Arthur Symons, Ezra Pound, and Ford Maddox Ford. He was a master of mail-order book sales. The list of imprints he established is as long as a leg. He was Jean Valjean to New York Society For the Supression of Vice leader John S. Sumner's Javert. He spent nine years in jail on state and federal obscenity convictions. He gave his name to a  key Supreme Court 1st Amendment decision. Samuel Roth's personal and professional activities - they were one and the same - ultimately allowed Americans to read whatever they wanted to; his sacrifice at the Court in 1957 made it safe for U.S. citizens to buy legal American copies of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita in 1958 and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch in 1959 without Mrs. Grundy at their door with SWAT team and incinerator.

Roth, at right, in his Poetry Book Shop, Greenwich Village 1920.

"Samuel Roth…was a man of considerable culture. Some of the material he sold was trash; some of it was unquestionably literature" (Charles Rembar). He believed that "reading is itself is a great good, any kind of reading is better than no reading and some people will read only rather low material, which I am willing to supply" (Samuel Roth, as paraphrased by his attorney, Charles Rembar, in his The End of Obscenity).

Sam Roth (1893-1974), if he is remembered at all, is infamous for his literary piracies. After he serially published twelve excerpts from Joyce's Ulysses without authorization in Two Worlds, Sylvia Beach, who had published the first edition of Ulysses in Paris, at Joyce's behest organized an international protest in 1927 against Roth with 167 internationally respected intellectuals and artists signing the document, including Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Albert Einstein. He was immediately vilified. This incident has deeply scarred Roth's legacy. Jay A. Gertzman, with evidence not available to earlier scholars, makes a strong case for reappraising Samuel Roth's guilt, both legal and ethical, in a new and definitive biography.

Issue 1, No. 1, December, 1925.

Gertzman, who in his Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920-1940 (1999), exposed the edgy world of the clandestine, East Coast-U.S. publication of sexually-themed literature, has now, after at least fifteen years of research, published this long-awaited biography of Roth, Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist, the first deeply researched, full-length investigation of the man and his milieu.

Samuel Roth.

Grade C-Z moviemakers were once consigned to Gower Gulch, a low-rent, run-down section of Hollywood near the major studios but a light year distant from their  superior quality; it was also known as Poverty Row. Brazen upstarts, outsiders, and finaglers with ambition but little money and desperate to distribute their product through a system dominated by the big studios vied for the eyeballs of movie-goers. New York publishers short on cash but long on brash found themselves in similar circumstances. Being proudly Jewish and thus not well-connected to or well-perceived by book publishing's elitist, gentile power-centers didn't help. Having a constitutional attraction to literature, modern and classical, fiction  and non-fiction that defied contemporary moral standards was certainly a disadvantage. A strong anti-authoritarian streak and determination to publish and accept the consequences (but not without a fight) in concert with a fundamental aversion to censorship in a free society only made matters worse. Being a blatant huckster came with the territory; publishing was a Darwinian business. Easily victimized, you did what you had to do to survive. Roth, a downtown publisher with uptown aspirations, was all of these things, and a writer, too, a brilliant Columbia graduate with artistic pretensions and a voice for self-pity. Born in Galacia, he was raised on New York's Lower East Side, where chutzpah was sliced thick and Roth's portion super-sized.

Roth's mug shot, 1930, upon beginning his two-month prison
sentence for selling copies of Joyce's Ulysses in Philadelphia.

An outsider to begin with, the Ulysses controversy made him an outcast, a  pariah for his sin as "desecrater of literary expression." Gertzman carefully mounts a strong case that Roth was not the philistine he has been made out to be. 

• Roth did not "pirate" Ulysses. Because of a clause in contemporary U.S. copyright law written to protect the domestic printing trade, books that were not printed on an American-based press were not granted copyright protection. Ulysses was, within the U.S., in the public domain. Blame Congress.

• There is evidence that Joyce and Roth's mutual friend, Ezra Pound, acting as Joyce's literary agent, gave Roth the go-ahead, and that arrangements for payment had been made.

• Joyce's outrage was disingenuous. While sincerely trying to protect his image as avant-garde genius he was also a shrewd businessman not without keen commercial instincts. The furor of his friends and supporters was exaggerated. Edited excerpts of Ulysses had been previously published and no one complained about it. A managed protest could only increase awareness and build demand for the book's ultimate legal publication in full in the United States (Random House, 1934). Genius aesthete versus greedy capitalist barbarian always makes a good story.

• Joyce's concern that sales of the Beach edition of the book would be hurt by Roth's excerpts to a broad audience (Roth wanted his publications bought by the average man on the street; his overriding goal was to popularize literature of all kinds and get it to the hinterlands) was groundless and something of a canard. With its limited press run and price the Beach edition was never meant or expected to attract a broad readership beyond wealthy collectors.

Gertzman goes on in depth and what we take away is that there is plenty of blame to spread amongst the actors in this bit of literary theater. Roth was not a boogey-man. He was, to a large degree, the perfect scapegoat.

Sketch, undoubtedly by Mahlon Blaine, for an advertisement.

Are you aware that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a memoir concerning his incestuous relationship with his sister, Elisabeth? In 1951 Roth published My Sister and I (NY: Boar's Head) based upon a manuscript in Nietzsche's hand that fell into Roth's possession in 1924. Its first edition went through fourteen printings. He initially advertised its publication in 1924 but ran out of money (Roth never got rich publishing anything, much less Ulysses, and was always in a financial bind of some sort). After a raid on Roth's offices by John S. Sumner in 1929 the manuscript was thought lost. It resurfaced during a 1940s inventory. Real or apocryphal Nietzsche? Gertzman presents the critical arguments, strong on both sides. The jury remains out.

Roth was a big cat who, when wounded, roared and attacked, a Lion of Judah. He was a "steadfast Jew and Zionist...who became so distressed by what he felt was lack of support from his co-religionists that he, after claiming to be instructed by Jesus in a vision, wrote Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All Frontiers of Civilization, a vicious 325-page anti-Semitic tract that was used by Nazis for propaganda and is kept in print by right-wing white-supremacist groups today" (Michael Bronski).

NY: Golden Hind Press, 1934.

• • •

Thrill of the Trade Department:  around ten years ago I had Roth's personal copy of another publisher's piracy of A Scarlet Pansy (NY: Nesor [Rosen, backwards], 1937) pass through my hands. Within, Roth made penciled revisions, cuts, and expurgations for his planned reissue (NY: Royal, 1940). The book also possessed subsequent annotations by sexual folklorist and bibliographer Gershon Legman, who worked for Roth during the 1930s, recording what Roth was up to with this book, from Legman's library, acquired directly from his widow, Judith. I felt as if I was sitting next to Roth as he worked on the book. Thanks, GL.

• • •

Roth lost his 1957 appeal to the Supreme Court to vacate his 1956 conviction for obscenity; he went to jail. But he won the war. The Court's Constitutional test in Roth v. United States - that for a work to be judged obscene its "dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest" of the "average person, applying contemporary community standards" without any redeeming social value whatsoever opened the door to soft-porn. Soon, "redeeming social value" could be found in anything no matter how hard-core, particularly if publishers hired medical professionals or literary critics (real or otherwise) to write prefaces explaining why Doing It With Dad and Brother Dan While Mom Sings Hawaiian War Chant presents an intimate family interpersonal dynamic with deep psychological insight into the human condition and a penetrating sociological view of the exotic byways of love in an All-American metropolis, thus saving it from  Vice Squad condemnation.

Scholars and citizens with an interest in modern literature and the struggle for frank expression and publication of  candid material in a free society will be captivated by Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist. I believe every library should own a copy; it's a must-acquire. For those fascinated by the shadow world of clandestine publishing and modern lit. in the U.S. it's a must-read.

But it's not a free read; you have to pay for it and that's how it should be. Yet at $74.95 it may be a bit too un-free. Issued by University Press of Florida it's a case study of what has gone so wrong with university press and books-on-books publishing. While the volume is very attractive its production quality is not what you'd expect from a book costing $75. And the $75 cost is likely connected to its print run, which, given the current state of the market (dismal), cannot have been more than 500 copies.

I can't help but think that if Roth were alive and the publisher, the book would have been issued as a fine trade paperback for $25 in an initial print-run of 2,000 copies and distributed via mail order and through every newsstand location in the country with accompanying hard-sell suggestive and sensational hoopla and ballyhoo using every free marketing tool available to spread the word that this is a sizzler, a book the major publishers found too hot to handle, an important book on American literary and publishing history about the man who died so that Ulysses, Casanova Jr.'s Tales, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Pageant of Lust, and The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags (Roth's best-selling exposé of President Herbert Hoover, 1931) could live, and made it possible for the huddled masses to not only breathe but read free.

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GERTZMAN, Jay A. Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist.  Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. xxviii, 387, [1] pp. Illustrations throughout. Illustrated boards. $74.95. Release: 4/23/2013.

UPDATE: 
A PRE-PUBLICATION DISCOUNT ($30 total) HAS BEEN EXTENDED THROUGH JUNE: Order online at http://www.upf.com/ book.asp?id=GERTZ001
This link will appear as: University Press of Florida: Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist
Click on “add cloth to cart”
Click on “apply code” (just above the “check out” button) and enter code: PP113
Follow ordering instructions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Preface

Chapter One: 1893-1916: From a Galician Shtetl to Columbia University.

Chapter Two: 1917-1925: Prelude to an International Protest: A Rising, Pugnacious Man of Letters.

Chapter Three: 1925-27: “Damn his impertinence. Bloody Crook”: Roth Publishes Joyce.

Chapter Four: 1928-34: Roth Must Live: A Successful Business and Its Bankruptcy.

Chapter Five : 1934: Jews Must Live. “We Meet Our Destiny on the Road We Take To Avoid It”

Chapter Six 1934-39: A Stretch in the Federal Penitentiary.

Chapter Seven: 1940-1949: Roth Breaks Parole, Uncovers a Nazi Plot, Gives “Dame Post Office” Fits, and Tells His Own Story in Mail Order Advertising Copy.

Chapter Eight: 1949-1952: Times Square, Peggy Roth, Southern Gothic, Celine, and Nietzsche.

Chapter Nine: 1952-57: The Windsors, Winchell, Kefauver: Back to Lewisburg.

Chapter Ten: 1958-74: “It Had Been a Long Time since Someone Like You Had Appeared In the World”: Roth Fulfills his Mission.

Appendix: Samuel Roth’s Imprints and Business Names.

Bibliography.

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Other books by Jay A. Gertzman:

A Descriptive Bibliography of Lady Chatterley's Lover. With Essays Toward a Publishing History of the Novel.

Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920-1940. 
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Full Disclosure: Mr. Gertzman and I are friends, and he kindly acknowledges me in the book as a source, however modest my contribution - and it was, indeed, very modest.

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Image of My Sister and I advertisement courtesy of Mr. Gertzman's website, with our thanks.
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A Rare And Revealing Erotic Movable Book From 1846 (May Be NSFW)

By Stephen J. Gertz

It's as rare a book as you will find, if you can find a copy. There are no auction records. There are no copies found in institutional libraries worldwide. It is not found in any of the usual and unusual bibliographies of erotica, nor in any of the major and minor dealer or auction house catalogs devoted to erotica that I know of.  I've reached out to other scholars in the field. Though they are charmed by it nobody has ever seen this delightful piece.

It is Variations de l'Amore, a suite of nine numbered, gilt-bordered watercolors, image size 115 x 160 mm,  with overlaid slips that was clandestinely issued c. 1846 (that date appearing on one of the plates), likely in Germany, with captions in German and French.

It is not the earliest work of erotica in movable book format, innocent scenes whose overlays, when lifted, reveal graphic sexual situations. I have seen two other erotic movable books with overlays, Moeurs de Paris 2eme Livraison, with illustrations by, amongst others, Achille Devéria, published c. 1835 in London (i.e. Paris), and Les Portes et Fenêtres, paru en livraisons (Paris, 1835) with plates by Henri Monnier, Devéria, etc., its "doors and windows" providing an eyeful when opened.

That there are erotic movable books may come as a surprise to those who associate the form exclusively with childrens literature. The reality is that, until the mid-19th century, movable books were primarily created for and marketed to adults, and "adult content" was not unknown. 

Yet few erotic movable books have survived, certainly intact with all of their, by nature, fragile overlays or other movable parts present, working, and in collectible condition. They were handled by adults with the same gusto as those meant for children, which is to say, vigorously. There are few virgin erotic movables extant; most that have survived were assaulted and sullied, to one degree or another, by hands animated by desire; their maidenhead is ancient history. Which is why this example is so extraordinary. It's as if the original owner was too shy and inhibited to peek beneath the overslips, the knowledge of what might be revealed enough to excite his imagination.

This little gem, unearthed who knows where, is currently being offered, along with another suite of six erotic movable watercolors, for a low five-figure British pound sum. If you collect movable books in general it's a must-have and worth every American penny, if you have at least 1,000,000 pennies. There was surely only a small number produced and this may be the only surviving example.

If you collect movable books meant for children and are put-off by erotic content, consider that human erotic activity is a playground where adults can relax and enjoy uninhibited fun, a refuge from the harsher realities of adulthood, the sexual arena a sandbox for mature children with sex-toys as pail and shovel .

__________

Images courtesy of Shapero Rare Books, currently offering this item, with our thanks.
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Hey, Rare Book Guy! Is It Erotica, Curiosa, Or Pornography? (May be NSFW)

By Stephen J. Gertz

Hey Rare Book Guy!

I was looking through a rare book catalog from the early 1980s. The dealer subtitled his business, Erotica, Curiosa, and Sexology. What's curiosa? What's the difference between erotica and curiosa? And what’s the difference among erotica, curiosa, and pornography?

- Lost in Intercourse, Pennsylvania, USA.

Dear Lost:

Nice, though exhausted double-entendre, place to be lost in; the burg of biped bonomos in hominid drag. I'm sure the Amish who populate the town enjoy being the object of a cheap sex joke.

Yours is a highly serendipitous query. It’s almost as if I made it up.

First edition, Histoire d'O, 1954.

On May 11, 2012, Christie’s - Paris is offering eighteen lots of “Curiosa”  in its  Importants Livres Anciens, Livres d'Artistes et Manuscrits sale.

I’ve spent a lot of time considering curious literature, of which there is no shortage: strange, bizarre, and weird books occupy a warm space in my heart, with a large library of volumes archived within my right cerebral hemisphere. This accounts for my head always being slightly pitched to the right, as if I'm observing the world with analytical interest instead of merely leaning so due to heavy internal bookshelves.

If you’re outside of Rio De Janero, the carioca is certainly curiosa. Curious literature and carioca, however, have nothing to do with the curiosa that Christie’s is auctioning off.

Edouard Chmot, Rêves et Masturbation.

Early in my career I specialized in sex-oriented literature. I’ve studied it going on thirty years now. So, when I was reading through the Christie’s catalog my head snapped back when I saw “Curiosa.” It’s not a word one comes across very often these days. It’s a throwback to an earlier era. I was amused. I suspect the cataloger was amused when he/she used the word. To those below fifty years old it’s a “Huh?”

By Hans Bellmer, from: Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, 1971.

 So, what exactly does curiosa mean?

John Carter, in his classic, ABC For Book Collectors, states, “This familiar subject heading may cover anything from the risqué or gallant...to the indecent, which would be more properly listed under Erotica. It will sometimes include medical or pathological works, but these are nowadays mostly cataloged frankly under ‘Sex’ or more generally under ‘Sexology.’”

By Carter's standard, curiosa encompasses the suggestive through the explicit, decent sex to indecent, the entire universe of sexual literature, pornography and erotica included, as well as sexual folklore and humor, but excluding the sciences. 

But flip to the index to G. Legman's The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Literature and Bibliography (1964) in search of curiosa and here's what you'll find: "Curiosa see Erotic Literature." Go to Erotic Literature in search of curiosa and there is no mention of it. To Legman, curiosa and erotic literature are one and the same thing.

Curiosa, a noun found in the titles of books as far back as the 17th century,  originally referred to the unusual, the wondrous, the intriguing, the eye-opening, the, well, curious. By the 1880s it had evolved in meaning to describe books concerning tabooed subjects, the tabooed subjects 99.9% of the time being, sex, sex, and you get the drift. For the Victorian era, it was perfect: innocent yet delicately suggestive and tempting with a sly wink.

Erotica is, by Carter's definition, indecent literature expressly meant to arouse sexual desire.  Most people think that's the definition of pornography (writing of prostitutes), a word originally coined to describe the  sixteenth and seventeenth century literary dialogues between whores, i.e the Ragionamenti (1534-36) by Pietro Aretino; La Retorica delle Puttane (The Whore's Rhetoric,1642) by Ferrante Pallavicino; L'Ecole des Filles (The School for Girls, 1655), attributed to Michel Millot and Jean L'Ange; and Aloisiae Sigeae Toletanae Satyra Sotadica de arcanis Amoris et Veneris (The Dialogues of Luisa Sigea, c. 1660) by Nicolas Chorier. From this humble and narrow beginning, the word has been conflated to represent the wide world of graphically open sex.

Most people now think that erotica is literature (or art) meant to arouse the mind as well as the genitals. Yet we also now understand that the mind and flesh are one; even the worst written porn engages the mind; the flesh follows. Erotica, though nice sounding and redolent of Eros, remains a messy word: what qualifies a book as being erotica? Is sexual content enough or is there something more involved than the "indecent"?

If erotica and pornography are synonymous, there is still no chance that an auction house or respectable rare book dealer will employ "pornography" as a catalog category; an aesthetic distinction is made: pornography = smut, and respectable auctioneers and rare book dealers do not purvey the vulgar and obscene. Unless, of course, it is of historic and/or literary significance, rare and desirable. It is then magically transformed into toney "erotica" and rendered acceptable. It's the literary equivalent of money-laundering with fabric softener thrown in for fresh-air scent and good feel. 

By Hans Bellmer, from: Kleist, Les Marionettes, 1969.

Just what titles is Christie’s offering under the curious rubric, curiosa? A first edition of Histoire d’O (The Story of O,  illustrated by Hans Bellmer, 1954); a collection of Tijuana Bibles, the sexually explicit comic books issued during the 1930s in the U.S.; Le Paysan Perverti ou les dangers de la ville (1776), Restif de la Bretonne’s  first autobiographical novel, a moral tale in epistolary format about the corrupting influence of Paris upon a peasant whose flesh is stirred; a mixed edition of Sade’s seven-volume Histoire de Juliette ou Les Prosperités du vice (“En Hollande: 1797,” i.e. Bruxelles, 1865, the final volume from the first edition of 1801-1802); a first edition of André Thiron’s Le Grande Ordinaire (1943), illustrated by Oscar Dominguez; artist Martin Van Maele’s Le Grande danse macabre vifs (c.1907-1908); Francis Carco’s L’amour vénal (1926); the Bellmer-illustrated edition of Lautreamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1971); Dali’s Les Métamorphoses érotiques (1969); a collection of illustrations by Edouard Chimot, all explicit; etc.

By Marcel Vertés, from: Caroco, L'amour vénal, 1926.

The tame to the feral is represented

It's all curiosa but is it erotica or pornography?

From a Tijuana Bible, c. 1930s.

There are those who make distinctions between the two genres of sexual literature. These differences generally concern class and art. Erotica is high class, pornography is low; erotica has artistic merit, pornography does not. Erotica is beyond the law and legal, pornography is often subject to censorship. Erotica can be charming, pornography is graceless. Erotica enlightens the human experience, pornography debases it. Erotica is literature; pornography is trash. Erotica is healthy, pornography is sick.

By Oscar Dominguez, from: Thirion, Le Grand Ordinaire, 1943.

Clearly, these are opinions and highly subjective. “What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another” (D.H. Lawrence, Pornography and Obscenity). Yet in the same essay Lawrence posits that “pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is unpardonable.” Lawrence goes further: “even I would censor genuine pornography, rigorously.”

Restif de la Bretonne, Le Paysan Perverti, 1776.

Yet what constitutes “genuine” pornography? Inauthentic erotica? Lawrence circles back on himself here, and we’re back to the subjective. Nuance creates a general, agreed upon need for a different word to express a concept that possesses objective shades of meaning; synonyms are never absolutely and exactly synonymous. Yet because erotica and pornography are entirely subjective concepts whose meanings have yet to be objectively agreed upon, arguing what’s what and which is which is a hopeless exercise in sophistry.

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's 1964 threshold for pornography - "I know it when I see it" -  just won't to. It's a tad imprecise.

Susan Sontag didn’t bother with these distinctions. The word erotica never passes her lips; the word that does, she's not happy about.

“I’m willing to accept (in the privacy of serious intellectual debate, not in the courts) the dubious label of pornography...The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary merit to the entire volume of subliterary fiction produced for mass taste” (The Pornographic Imagination).

From: Sade, Histoire de Juliette, 1797 (1865).

What I’ve noticed over the years is that If it’s current and crude, it’s called porn. If it’s old and crude, it’s erotica; age plays a role. The engravings to Sade’s Histoire de Juliette were pornographic and obscene when originally published but two hundred years later they possess a vintage, ye olde dirtie booke charm, erotic artifacts from a bygone era and somewhat quaint. The medium of engraving, no longer in general use, plays a role in distancing us from the subject matter, implicitly disarming whatever danger the imagery once explicitly threatened. The image above, in modern color photography, becomes Debbie Does Dallas And Then Some and we enter lewd, rude, and crude land, which is just fine if lewd, rude, and crude interests you. A hundred years from now, DDDATS, if a DVD survives, will become a curious relic worthy of collection and study. Age will lend acceptance and credibility. YIKES! will settle into lower case and lose the exclamation point.

From: Martin Van Maele,  Le Grande danse macabre vifs.

Perhaps the only work being offered by Christie's that can safely, without question, be called curiosa is Martin Van Maele’s Le Grande danse macabre vifs, a work that contains, as seen here, a strange, bizarre, and weird image that is definitely curiosa. Oh, is it curious, a troubadour strummin' on the ol' banjo as he croons O Sole Mio to Aphrodite in his room with a callipygian view.

I expect that some readers will disagree, perhaps vehemently, that there is no rational and objective difference between erotica, curiosa, and pornography. That's fine, as long as you understand that the perceived differences are purely subjective. Put three people in a room and you'll get five opinions on the matter.

I propose that the word curiosa be deep-sixed as a catch-all for sex-lit. It's a curious euphemism, an indirect word so mild, ambiguous, and detached from what it attempts to describe that, while useful in the Victorian Age when sex was not openly discussed or written about,  is now useless as a classification. Livres libre - liberated or "free" books - covers it nicely, I think, with an upscale Continental gloss. It's a phrase the French have often used to describe sexually open and graphic literature, and dodges the erotica v. porn conflict, ultimately a false dichotomy.

Of course, no auctioneer or rare book dealer will ever market "free books." It sends a mixed message guaranteed to inspire knuckleheads to demand the books, gratis.

Perhaps the best way to resolve the issue is to simply catalog sex-lit. as Pornographie, the French spelling that classes it up and turns the rough flannel into silk thus providing the oh-la-la! without the oy vey.

In the meantime, I hereby hijack curiosa as a precise category to cover curious literature.

The Carioca I leave to Fred and Ginger:

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All images courtesy of Christie's, with our thanks.
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Fran Lebowitz On Book Collecting

by Stephen J. Gertz

Fran  Lebowitz,  whose  debut  collection of devastatingly witty essays,  Metropolitan Life (1978), and  its  companion,  Social Studies (1981), put her on the literary star map as a latter-day Dorothy Parker,  and whose  subsequent "writer's  blockade" has   become  the most celebrated case of scribe with blank slate in recent - and, perhaps, since ancient - history, does not need an excuse to talk about books and reading.

In an interview-essay from 2010,  Fran Lebowitz on Reading, that has not received the broad attention it deserves, she discusses, amongst other things, rare books and their collection.

"I'm not a collector," she says. "I don't care about things like that. I'm not a collector because I'm not that organized. I'm not grown-up enough to collect things."

"But," she adds. "I have acquired a stellar collection of odd books, weirdo books, books that don't fit easily into categories."

A category, however, that her odd books do easily fit into is heteromorphic literature, a broad, all encompassing genre that, under this name has a nice, academic gloss that lends credence to their collection and study. The common alternative is Weirdiana. In Lebowitz's case, perhaps Oddiana is the proper category.

"I have a very small but choice collection of books about the Masons, the Odd Fellows and the Elks. I particularly like Odd Fellows books. They're a little harder to find… You don't hear about the Odd Fellow much any more. I looked them up in the telephone book here but I guess in New York you don't need a separate listing for Odd Fellows."

Though she can be bitingly caustic she is invariably polite, so it should come as no surprise that she is a fan of a certain arbiter of the social graces.

"I collect Emily Post. I think I have everything of hers but I don't keep up with the revised editions. I have a book called Manners for the Millions [1932, in three different editions], which is a manual for immigrants to the United States. Emily Post may tell you how to properly address a Colonel, this tells you not to wipe your nose on your sleeve."

Many careers as a rare bookseller have begun when personal collecting got out of hand and insanity prevailed.

"I was once in Cleveland on a book tour and a bookshop there had just bought the library of a parochial grammar school and they were selling the books for ten cents a pound. There were these big meat scales. I went crazy…For about thirty dollars I bought eight thousand books.

Beware the parent whose personal habits and dire influence can lead children astray and onto a dark path for life.

"My mother was a big bookworm. Not a bibliophile. My mother got me into what has been for my entire life certainly what could be called my drug addiction: the reading of detective stories. I read five or six a week and must have eight billion of them…I suppose I read them for the atmosphere or the characters but I read them like a drug. I read them instead of taking heroin."

Don't imagine that Fran Lebowitz is a literary snob:

"I love trash. I like Jacqueline Susann and the early Harold Robbins. I love Jackie Collins."

She also has an interest in smut.

"I have a pornography collection. It's not a huge one. The really good stuff is too expensive for me. I wrote some for a company called Midway Press...

"The first one I wrote myself and it was called House of Leather...Then I wrote two or three others with about five people...My copies of these books are gone and I'm not looking for them. I have a finicky aversion to buying second hand pornography because I know where it's been."

Her reading and collecting interests are not confined to detective fiction, weird books, etiquette manuals, and porn.

"I would say that if I collect anything literary I collect O'Hara first editions, not that they're that hard to find. Each printing was about eight billion. O'Hara is a really important American writer and a really overlooked one."

On the life of a dedicated reader frittering away precious time, Fran has this to say:

"I would rather read than have any kind of real life, like working, or being responsible...All the things that I never did because I was reading, so what? If someone said to me, how did you spend your life? I'd have to say, lying on the sofa reading."

Fran Lebowitz's relationship to books is intimately overt.

"...When I was a very little child after I'd read a book I really liked I'd kiss it. Love is really the word... Children have emotional relationships with inanimate objects...The way a child makes a person out of a doll, which I never did, I made people out of books."

It is always comforting to be surrounded by loved ones.

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Read the full interview here.

This interview, and others with Diana Vreeland, John Waters, Susanna Moore, and Albert Murray, appears on the website I recently discovered for an impressive book shop in Harlem, NYC, The Private Library. They appear in the website's section, The Well-Dressed Bibliophile. I have devoured everything on those pages; a very tasty meal.

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If you haven't seen Public Speaking, Martin Scorsese's 2010 HBO documentary about Fran Lebowitz, why not? It's now available on DVD.

Here's the trailer:

She is the consummate New Yorker-Smart-Funny-Yakker. I watched it three times in a row.

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I Wrote For the Mafia

by Stephen J. Gertz

In late 1988, desperate for something green other than mold in my bank account, I contacted an editor at Pacific News, a periodicals distributor located in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, at the suggestion of a friend.

Pacific News had nothing to do with news. It was, rather, one of the major publishers and distributors of pornography in print, arguably the largest on the West Coast, one of the many wholesalers that, until his conviction in 1989 for income tax evasion (he refused to pay any. None. At all), had been a part of the infamous Reuben Sturman’s shady international porn empire. How shady was it? Sturman was  protected by the Gambino family of New York, soliciting their security services (read: partnership) after Jimmy "The Weasel" Fratianno of Los Angeles shook him down and beat him up. After Reuben’s incarceration, escape, and recapture - on the lam from everybody, he was nabbed with his girlfriend in a cheap motel room across the street from Disneyland in Southern California, his version of Fantasyland up for grabs - his organized-crime partners split up the syndicate he had created. Paul Wisner, who had been Sturman’s straw-man when he bought Pacific News in 1974, was still nominally in charge while the true owners remained in the background.

Reuben Sturman, behind bars.
This is one of the very few photographs of the man,
who, prior to his imprisonment, hated having his picture
taken and often wore Groucho glasses with rubber nose,
bushy eyebrows and moustache to vex photogs.

When I decide to write a porn novel I don’t mess around. I want a publisher with muscle in the marketplace.

I met the editor, Dennis Rodriguez, who had been working in the porn trade on and off since the 1960s. Without   benefit  of   writing   sample  he gave  me an  assignment and  informed me  of  the   basics.     "35,000 words; 150 pages, twenty-five lines to a page; a sex scene every three pages. All rights ceded outright." The fee? $500.

In 1968 pulp porn writers were earning upwards of $1200 per manuscript. That $500 in 1988 was worth $120 in 1968. With the visual supplanting the verbal the writers market for porn had drastically shrunk.

Speaking of the visual, Pacific's offices had my retinas working in overdrive. Three or four average-looking, to all appearances prim, secretaries sat at desks strewn with humongous upright dildoes. The women were blasé. One had a lampshade precariously balanced atop a particularly anatomically correct and ambitious latex proxy. Another used a Doc Johnson special as a paperweight. Just another day at the orifice.

O[y] Canada

Dennis made it clear that because the book would be distributed in Canada I'd have to follow a few special guidelines. He handed me a copy of a Canadian Customs Notice dated February 11, 1988.

Subject: Administration of Code 9956.

This is to provide further clarification of Customs guidelines with regard to the interpretation of the terms 'degradation' and 'dehumanization,' as they are applied in the administration of Code 9956 of Schedule VII to the Customs Tariff. The following examples from court jurisprudence are provided to assist Customs officials and the public in their understanding of how these terms may be defined in the context of applying the provisions of Code 9956:

1) Goods which depict or describe degrading or dehumanizing acts tend predominantly to deindividualize and impersonalize sexual acts by inciting the reader or viewer to look upon the     individuals involved as objects or means to be used for one's   personal gratification. In particular, the individuals are deprived of unique human characteristics in that they are portrayed as sexual objects whose only redeeming features are their genitals. For example, this type of degradation can be seen in potrayals of individuals as prizes or trophies for competitions where the winner uses the person as he/she chooses.

2) Goods which depict or describe an aggressive, powerful person who derives pleasure from inflicting pain upon a     weaker individual, degrading the victim by conveying the message that he/'she enjoys abusive anti-social behavior. An example of the manifestation of power used to degrade an individual is evident in pictorials, stories, films, etc., which show individuals who are in positions of power and/or authority who use abuse, force, coercion and threats to get their victims to perform sexual favors.

3) Another common theme which is used in sexually explicit material to degrade and dehumanize individuals is to depict them as having animal characteristics. The imagery of bars,     cages, collars, leashes, etc., is often used to reduce the individual to the status of an animal. In these instances, there is often an element of restraint (i. e., the person is being caged against his/her will) and the implication is that the individual is behaving like an animal.

   

4) Court jurisprudence has established that materials which depict or describe pregnant and/or lactating women in a sexually explicit context debases motherhood and are degrading to all women.

   

5) Further examples of acts which are considered to be degrading and dehumanizing are as follows: Group ejaculation on one person, excessive ejaculation on a person's face, double-penetration of an orifice and the insertion of objects that would or could cause pain, including the fist or foot, and submissive acts such as the licking of another person's boot in a sexual context. Depictions and descriptions such as these have been found by the courts to be obscene in that they exceed the standards of what contemporary Canadian society will tolerate.

Kinda gets the creative juices flowing (but, please, not on a person's face), yes?

Rodriguez further provided me with a company checklist: No force at all; No bondage and discipline; No dominance; No submission; No anal; No fetish; No incest.

I wrote the book in four days. It was difficult. I kept recalling the Canadian Customs Notice: "No lactating women, no pregnant women." It would never have occurred to me to include swollen damsels in my porn novel but Canadian Customs had infected my mind with images of debasing and dehumanizing sexual acts. Now they were all I could think about.

I wrote by the rules: Häagen Dazs™ vanilla bean  in a   hard-core cone. The novel's a snore, strictly scheiss und dreck. It was published by Lusty Library, distributed by Parliament News, and copyrighted by American Art Enterprises.

At the very top of the Customs Notice, a fax, ran the following: "9/28/88 [telephone number] TransMediaGrpUSA   Parliament News."

The Roots of Modern Porn

Pacific News was originally part of '60s porn-magnate Milton Luros' L.A.-based empire, which began in the late 1950s with American Art Agency (later Enterprises), a publisher of girlie magazines. Luros, who began his career as a respected illustrator for  science-fiction pulps during the  1940s - early 1950s,  soon moved into  publishing  nudist magazines, essentially full-frontal porn with legal blessing.  He was the master of the stretch, the cautious, incremental pushing of boundaries. With the U.S. Supreme Court obscenity rulings of the mid- through late-1960s, however, the walls came tumblin' down and hard-core came to town.

Science Fiction Quarterly, May 1951.
Cover by Milton Luros.
From cheesecake in space to
lord of porn: an artist's odyssey.

Early on, Luros established Parliament News (Paul Wisner was a staff-salesman, eventually running it for Luros), to distribute his wares and, over the years, had bought other, smaller, distributorships, including Pacific News, to consolidate his position as the largest, most respected publisher of pornography in the U.S. By 1974,  however, legal pressures had forced his retirement and he sold out to Sturman, who had been anxious to  add the Luros assets to his Cleveland (later L.A.)-based syndicate and extend his control of the East Coast trade to the entire nation. By 1988, Pacific News, under Sturman's arm's length leadership and brilliant (if typically unethical) business smarts (creating a massive, dizzying maze of interlocking corporations), had become  part of a global syndicate that vertically integrated porn across all media, including sex toys, manufacture to retail, and was corporately safe as milk. But still completely shady; the olive oil remained dark green and there was nothing virgin about it. Business methods often involved a little help from his friends, of the physically emphatic sort. The whole operation was creepy. Dave Gardner, who worked as an art director at American Art Enterprises during the 1980s, recalls:

"I worked under Jerry Pecoraro [who may have been the longest surviving staff member of American Art Enterprises, joining in the mid-Sixties] who was doing mostly old-style cheesecake stuff. I worked the softcore side, doing magazine layout and typesetting. They also published some crappy fiction (not porno but cheesey science-fiction, westerns, mysteries, action, etc.), to somewhat legitimize the operation…The 'other side' of the building was off-limits. It housed Paul Wisner's office, other administrative offices, and London Press…One of the other artists had a friend working in London Press, so I got to go over there just once to see the hardcore work they did, but otherwise it was an unwritten law to stay away from there, a separation of smuts, so to speak.

"I saw Paul only occasionally, as his office was on the 'other' forbidden side. Once in a while I'd see this small Italian guy come in and walk around like he owned the place. I asked one of the guys about him, who told me to cool it, that this guy was a serious Mafioso who came up to collect bags of cash, and not to ask any more questions about him."

Under Luros' ownership, American Art Enterprises and all of the Luros constituent division offices were typical businesses; just open the door and walk in. Not so now. Dave Gardner continues:

"At American Art, you had to get buzzed in after being scrutinized by the receptionist. One time, word went through the building that we were going to be raided by LAPD vice. I sure as hell didn't want to to jail, but the boss wouldn't let us go home. So all day, I sat there shaking and wondering when the cops were going to bust through the door and lead me off in handcuffs. It never happened, though. The overall feeling at American Art was crass; I learned how to be ashamed of my work. It had the air of true smuttiness about it. I got the feeling we were just a mob front at American Arts. It was not a very pleasant experience."

When Reuben Sturman entered the trade it was a business. When he exited it was an industry.

What has any of the above have to do with rare books?

Having ultimately written a handful of dirty books for Pacific News/American Art Enterprises, my contributions to the decline of Western civilization have become exceedingly scarce, if not extinct. Print runs for pulp porn had, by 1988, declined to 1500-3000 copies from a late 1960s high of 20,000-50,000, so there were not that many in circulation to begin with. Factor in that, once read, copies were tossed into the garbage, and unsold books pulped. Further consider that few cared to collect paperback DBs, a phenomenon that would not fully emerge until the 1990s, and they were most certainly not collecting mine; only pre-1973  dirty books, the genre charmingly known in the paperback collecting world as “vintage sleaze,” are highly desired. Hell, even I didn’t collect mine; I only have one copy of the four DBs I wrote.

BERMAN, Jay (house pseud., here of SJG). Tales of Lust.
North Hollywood, California: American Art Enterprises, April 1989.
Lusty Library LL-626. 16mo.154 pp. Photo-illustrated wrappers.

Introducing, in its first appearance in twenty-two years, the first published book by “Jay Berman." I submitted it under the pseudonym, “Jacques Toutight.”  My alternative was “Boris Whocutchyakokov,” presciently foreshadowing the John and Lorena Bobbitt story five years hence. (Though sorely tempted I resisted using "Jack Goff," a blue-ribbon porn pseudonym claimed, alas, by another during the '60s).

The plot line is simple: A pedantic, professorial blowhard with a soft spot for  sesquipedalian  exposition regales the patrons of the seedy dive he’s parked in with tall, highly apocryphal tales of his sexual exploits. Yes, it’s autobiographical. The blurb on the rear wrapper succinctly sums things up: “Hot pleasure was what he demanded of life and he was not afraid to walk on the wild side in search of it!”

Absolutely true. I demand  a nice, pleasurable  steam-bath every now and then and once dared to patronize a small, run-down, all-Jewish spa in the Pico-Robertson/Little Tel Aviv district of L.A. where you never know what's going to happen. You don't know from wild until you've witnessed smoked salmon swim Pico Boulevard upstream - during rush-hour traffic, yet  -  as I have.

I would have used the more appropriate Yiddish-Americanism, shvitz-bath, above but feared, given the context of the post, that some might  think it slang for a sexual act forbidden by Canadian Customs.

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Factual information and interview with Dave Gardner referenced from An Amazing Kingdom of Thrills: American Paperback Erotica 1965-1973, the author's unpublished manuscript ©2001 (each rejection letter to my agent gushing before passing on it; Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, which, in part, also dealt with the porn trade, was making the rounds at the same time and got all the attention, i.e. offers).

Readers who would like to learn more about the fascinating Milton Luros - an honorable man in a dishonorable business - should read Everybody Loves Milton: Rabbi Porn, the definitive story, extracted from An Amazing Kingdom... and published in 2004 on veteran porn-trade editor Earl Kemp's website.

Portions of An Amazing Kingdom... were adapted for Sin-A-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties.

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