The Sinsational Vintage Porn Novel About the Rare Book Trade

[HUNTER, Evan]. JUDSON, Dean. Sin Dealer.
N.p. [Chicago]: Pillar Books [Greenleaf Publications] PB 813, 1963.
Cover by Harold W. McCauley.

From Books to Boudoirs!

 Luscious Leigh Wentworth was an expert at selling the valuable tomes in her store and adding to her volumes of forbidden experiences in her sin-scented bedroom! The price was high - in money for the books and in evilly twisted misbehavior for her body...but men laid it on the line when she showed them the passion-slaking delights of the merchandise she had to offer! Then she took Chris McNeill from Skid Row to make him her loot-and-lust partner...and the books began to balance in unexpected ways as he produced new satan-inspired tricks to match every one in her torrid library!

“Shrewd businesswoman and wanton lover...wrap them up in one voluptuous package and you have Leigh Wentworth, who knew the right price for rare books and her own ripe body (Wrapper blurb).

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

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

“’A hundred dollars!’”

Wentworth is a frosted blonde and frostier businesswoman:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“’Let’s go,’ he said.”

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

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

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

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

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

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The Isaac E. Leibowitz Monastery Of Rare Books

The rare book shop at the abbey of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, 
in the Southwest United States.

"550 years after Gutenberg's invention of mechanical movable type...much of the infrastructure that has girded the vast ecosystem of the book – bookstores, new and used, the book section at Costco, libraries that you actually have to visit, the book sale in the church basement – vanishes. Meanwhile, the 'monasteries' of the 21st century will be the rare-book libraries and special collections in universities, antiquarian booksellers working out of their homes or in shops on the margins of downtown" (The Globe and Mail, The Future of Books, Part 3).

Or, perhaps, a monastery in the American Southwest in a world where learning and advanced knowledge are scorned and to even read is considered a subversive activity. A world where illiteracy is the proud norm, ignorance is worn as a badge of honor, and to be called a Simpleton is an honorific, a  desired title of respect. The power of books to raise civilization has become their curse and so they must be, and are, razed.

The brothers of this Order of Rare Books have little if any knowledge of the contents of the books they protect; those who had understanding are long gone. The content could be liturgical texts, cookbook recipes, or glorified shopping lists for all anyone knows, each held with equal mystery and veneration by the friars, all perceived as objects of fear by the general populace and its leaders who want nothing to do with anything that smacks of intellect, which undermines and erodes traditional values, natural law, and simple common sense. The world has become flat again and would prefer to stay that way.

Welcome to the future monastery of rare books, the abbey of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, established by electrical engineer and radical book collector Isaac Edward Leibowitz to husband what little is left of written knowledge, to hide and protect books and surviving scraps of ephemera from the latter-day Philistines who would destroy them.
 

 First edition, 1960.

Dust jacket design by Milton Glaser.

It is the world created by Walter M. Miller Jr. in A Canticle For Leibowitz (copyright 1959; issued in 1960), one of the finest novels of science/speculative fiction ever written, winner of the Hugo Award (1961), and a book that has never been out of print since its initial publication, with countless printings, reissues, translations, and adaptations since released.

The novel began life as three short stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1955-57. The magazine was not a cheap rag featuring wild spaceship rides and aliens. It was "high-class sci-fi pulp," according to novelist Walker Percy. Miller added connective tissue and an enormous amount of additional material to provide  layers of complexity and depth when adapting the stories to  a full-length novel. There is much symbolism to decode, and a lot of Latin and a little of Hebrew to translate. A knowledge of the Old and New Testaments is helpful. We are, to a large degree and to the point, as mystified as the friars.

Though radical, it's not too far an imaginative leap from what is currently occurring  in general and in the contemporary rare book scene in particular.

The cultural climate is changing, moving away from the printed word and the book. A grass-roots movement of the angry and intellectually inchoate is challenging education, politics and the complexities of modern life to return to a plainer, more homey, and neatly arranged order, a return to once dependable certainties that have weakened if not wizened and died within the exponential growth of information and its availability.

There are fewer and fewer rare book shops; they appear to be headed for extinction. More than a few rare book dealers these days have little idea about the intellectual content of the books they sell; they've never read the books for pleasure or learning. They know the book's sales history, bibliographical minutia, and place within the collecting world. The book is a commodity and not much more.

Fewer and fewer enter the trade with a sense of vocation. And it is a calling, involving sacrifice of long hours for (mostly) income unequal to the effort, study, and thought. A love of learning for its own sake is important; the professional rare bookseller is in a constant state of learning about the books they offer; it's  always  wise to  know  more  about  the books you sell than the people you sell them to.

 21st century rare bookseller at work cataloging his stock.

And the modern rare book shop is a monastery. Silent, save for some quiet music in the background or telephone murmurings, employees sit at their desks, pouring over the books in front of them like medieval scribes, carefully examining and cataloging them. It is the rare pilgrim who enters a rare book shop in 2010.

For his efforts, Leibowitz is canonized by the Church. But while there are no saints in the rare book trade there are many whose dedication and commitment to books is holy, the books on their shelves held in a sacred trust from the past through the present and into the future, the evidence of humankind's progressive striving toward enlightenment and deep understanding of who and what we are, the world we live in and its nature, and how we fit into it.

Rare book sellers and special collections librarians are members of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, brothers and sisters in service to books, their preservation, availability, and the knowledge and wisdom that they provide. And book collectors are the laity of the Order, a congregation of pilgrims who privately preserve the written products of the collective mind of humanity.

Now, dark forces with loud, strident voices, wearing light and bright-colored clothing wish to return to those halcyon days of yesteryear, an imaginary place where all was right, before  folks too smart for their and our own good  took over, when advances in human knowledge were never a threat to moral and social certainties, and textbooks didn't need to be corrected to excise dissonance and assure consonance with long-held traditions that often come up short when weighed against the drive of human curiosity and the inexorable march of intellectual inquiry and its integrity.

 Albertus Magnus (1193 CE -1280 CE).

Detail of fresco by Tommaso da Modena, c. 1352.

It is no accident that Miller chose the friars of the abbey of Leibowitz to be of the Albertian Order. Saint Albertus Magnus was the  medieval Dominican bishop and philosopher renowned for the breadth and depth of his knowledge and belief in the peaceful coexistence of science and religion; there was no conflict. It is ironic that A Canticle For Leibowitz takes place in and around Texarkana. Miller could not have foreseen that one day the Texas School Board would vote to revise educational standards and public school textbooks to reflect a wishful reality  rather than the one bequeathed by rational human  investigation. It is a dishonest truth lit by a dimming torch that will extinguish if the goal is reached, leaving a darkness the torchbearers will call light and celebrate.

It's a post-apocalyptic world, the apocalypse born not of powerful nuclear arms but of hamstrung intellectual legs.
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MILLER, JR. Walter M. A Canticle For Leibowitz: A Novel. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1960. First edition. Octavo. 320 pp. Publisher's cloth. Dust jacket by Milton Glaser.

National Book Award winner Walker Percy declared A Canticle For Leibowitz "a mystery: it's as if everything came together by some felicitous chance, then fell apart into normal negative entropy. I'm as mystified as ever and hold Canticle in even higher esteem."

It is a modern masterpiece.

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The header photo is of Christ in the Desert Benedictine Monastery, Chamas River Valley, New Mexico.
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