Sin-A-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties

by Brittany A. Daley (Editor), Earl Kemp, Hedi El Kholti (Editor)

“What most distinguished these paperbacks wasn't their narratives but their frequently amazing covers, swashes of erotic eye-candy that, as surely as a Warhol soupcan, now define an era. And so the emphasis in this first-rate celebration is on the covers, with hundreds reproduced in what looks like accurate (i.e., soul-shocking) color.”—Publishers Weekly

Genres: Nonfiction, Art, Sexuality, Art Design, Pop Culture

268 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2004

Reviews

[Graham P · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sin-A-Rama is a deliciously sleazy thrill ride through a repressed decade of sin, vice and kinky sex. All the bases are covered here. Suburban swingers. Supernatural sin. Racial swapping. Science Fiction porn. Counterculture orgies. Drug-induced madness. Each lovingly spread in jaw-droppingly pristine photos of the original covers. Behold the stark, psychedelica of Robert Bonfils' nude starlets. Wallow in the bullet-breasted psychopaths inked by Gene Bilbrew. Eat up the soapy, high drama illustrations of Ed Smith. Really, I haven't encountered an art book so wonderful in quite some time. And the articles in the beginning (especially the Robert Silverberg's piece) really help give background to this brief, yet startlingly prolific, era of the forbidden paperback. Most brilliant.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Robert Silverberg’s opening essay “My life as a Pornographer” is the wow-factor from the writer’s perspective: He wrote one hundred fifty (150!) 50,000 word novels in the five years between 1959 and 1964!! His essay is a high point of this book for sure. The book also includes interesting essays on the east coast and the west coast soft-porn (considered hard-core at the the time) publishing scenes in the 1950s and 1960s before the supreme court decisions on obscenity. There’s also a too short interview with Earl kemp, an editor for one of the primary publishers. The profiles on writers and artists are pretty lame and add basically nothing except names of the content providers. The bulk of the book - 184 pages worth - is made up of cover art organized by “sleaze themes.” Although fascinating and semiotically ripe, i think Lovisi’s books might have collected the better cover art. Overall, though, this is a useful book for collectors because it also has some great appendices: a catalog of publishers, and psuedonym-author and author-psuedonym directories.

[Mike Hunchback · Rating 5 out of 5]

Untold history of Adult Paperbacks, A TRULY MIND-ALTERING WORK!

[Rosa · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a depressing book.

[Tenebrous Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beyond the terrific full-color reproductions of lurid paperback covers, you’ll get a glimpse of how the mid-century smut racket operated and the lives of the people who earned a living there. It’s by turns as grimy, titillating, and weirdly humorous as you’d expect.

[Peggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

More picture than history (and that's just fine with me), Sin-A-Rama provides an overview of the era of the sex paperback. We do get some history, and some pretty entertaining biographies of various writers and publishers, but totally worth it for being as close as I'm ever likely to get to Clyde Allison's James Bond parodies featuring the intrepid Agent 0008. You will be mine, Platypussy, oh yes, someday you will be mine.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mixed bag: Historical essays are hit and miss; excerpts from novels are almost all lame; cover art reproductions (the main attraction) range from bland to titillating to are-you-kidding-me?; and the descriptive catalog of publishers and the list of author pseudonyms are a service to humankind.

[Teree · Rating 5 out of 5]

Endlessly entertaining collection of images from the period of time that obviously churned out the most interesting smut book covers: The sixties. Intro by Lydia Lunch.

[John Defrog: global citizen, local gadfly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable exploration of the softcore porn book publishing business of the 1960s, which is interesting to me for a few reasons: (1) the great cover art, (2) the fact that one of my all-time favorite novelists, Lawrence Block, used to write them for a living (though I’ve never read any of them) and (3) the fact that the modern legal definition of obscenity in the US (the famous Miller test) stems from a case involving these types of books. Which is why we can write sex scenes with naughty words now.

Anyway, the book is mostly a collection of cover art, so some more history, anecdotes or book excerpts would have been nice, but it’s still a great book for anyone interested in pulps and/or retro porn, though be advised that by modern standards, 60s sex novels are so tame, it’s amazing to think people really went to jail for writing, publishing and/or selling them.