Just Read: Sin-A-Rama

The subtitle is Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties and it credits five editors (starting with Brittany A. Daley) and 7 contributors. It's a well-designed collection of paperback covers from the lowest-rent publishers (not the ones who did some sleazy books, the ones who only did sleazy books).

The art is wildly variable, of course, but some of it is very nice and some of it very bad; and which ones any particular reader drops into which bucket probably depends as much on the reader as the art. But it does seem to cover the whole spectrum of the field.

Most interesting to me was Robert Silverberg's essay "My Life as a Pornographer," though the shorter essays on Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block were also interesting. All in all, it was a fascinating world - we're almost certainly better off these days, but it's interesting to read about.