Two new books from Feral House
Feral House, one of my favorite publishers of outré history, recently released two excellent books. Dope Menace has hundreds of color photos of sleazy drug paperback books, and The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People is a re-issue of the Wallace Family's (The Book of Lists, The People's Alamanac) fascinating history of the bedroom proclivities of famous folks, past and present.
While we now enjoy this exploitative genre for its campy kitsch, gloriously bad writing, and outlandish misinformation, drug paperback books were once a transgressive medium with a perversely seductive quality.
Dope Menace collects together hundreds of fabulously lurid and collectible covers in color, from xenophobic turn-of-the century tomes about the opium trade to the beatnik glories of reefer smoking and William S. Burroughs’ Junkie to the spaced-out psychedelic ’60s. We mustn’t forget the gonzo paranoia brought on by Hunter S. Thompson in the ’70s, when anything was everything.
For its initial edition of The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People in 1981, the legendary Wallace family read 1,500 biographies, pored over rare correspondence, legal transcripts and medical reports, and interviewed lovers, confidants and associates of many distinguished men and women in world history.
This 600-page illicit encyclopedia of the private lives of writers, politicians, athletes, popes, rabble-rousers, composers, rock stars and sex symbols has been revised and enlarged, with a dozen new entries, including ones on Kurt Cobain, Malcolm X, Wilt Chamberlain, Ayn Rand, Jim Morrison, Nico, Aleister Crowley, and more.
Previously:
- Stack of intriguing books from Feral House and Process Media ...
- Feral House and Process books - Boing Boing
- The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George ...
- Book on the current Secession movement (and Sarah Palin) - Boing Boing
- BBC: W's grandpappy planned fascist coup of USA - Boing Boing
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Where's her nipple?
@1: These are your boobs on drugs.
We love that illustration of that human anomaly; maybe the nipple-less woman was one of David Icke's reptilian aliens. No wonder she loved the mobster's skin-popped heroin.
This image was modified for us as the cover of "Dope Menace" from the book "Vice Rackets of Soho"...
Okay, I need to set you straight on one thing about "The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People". "The legendary Wallace family" delegated much of the obviously massive research and actual writing to a staff of dozens they had accumulated during the writing of two "People's Almanacs" and three "Books of Lists" before it, some of whom nobody in the family ever met personally. I know, because I was one of those literary worker bees ("CW" for the different first-name I was working under at the time) actually credited as an article author. There's NOTHING wrong with that, but it doesn't reflect the countless hours of total work that went into that volume (and the other Wallace Family uber-references).
I experienced my most embarrassing boo-boo as a writer working on that book, which I previously documented in my own blog: http://www.wendell.me/the-sex-life-of-schopenhauer To their credit (or maybe not), they actually assigned me another article after that debacle, the poet Robert Burns.
All the people who helped the Wallaces research the book are acknowledged prominently.....
Awww man I ordered Dope Menace from Amazon about two weeks ago.. I thought it would be reprints of stories, not just pics for book covers... disappointed.
I got fooled this way once before by a "Mens Adventure Magazines" hardcover book. nice photos of old covers, but seriously lacking in text.
Ah, I have the fondest memories of Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People. My grandmother had a copy, and I used that in biographical research for more middle school projects than I can count.
RANCOR01: you named yourself well.
Dope Menace is not about excerpts from drug books, as there are MANY books that serve this purpose, but it does include some excellent text about how drug books were published and dealt with legally throughout the twentieth century. The covers are so freaking amazing, and many of them within "Dope Menace" are not seen in any other available book. You can even download a PDF of the first 60 pages or so do get a very good idea of what the book is about: http://feralhouse.com/titles/new_releases/dope_menace.php
As for the Men's Adventure Magazine, the Feral House volume, "It's a Man's World," has loads of great text about how those magazines were put together and worked. All fascinating stories. The Taschen version, that came out a couple years after the Feral House edition, is limited in text. Here's about the FH edition: http://feralhouse.com/titles/kulchur/its_a_mans_world.php
I haven't read the Wallace book, but I did find a book, as a youth, that featured first person accounts of famous people on how they lost their virginity. Some of them went into rather embarrassing detail.