History of Adult Books

[spacy]

50 - 60 years ago "adult" books could only be found in restricted viewing areas of news shops. They were published by only a handful of imprints, "Greenleaf" was one of the first, then "BEE-Line" and "PET books" were the most prolific publishers. Greenleaf books were distinctive, the cover had green margins and a black border around a b/w drawing loosely evocative of the theme of the story inside. They were published on a schedule of two or three titles a month. BEE-Line an PET initially had color drawings but later graduated to a color photo, on the cover, but non of them ever showed nipples or full frontal of the woman - or man (yes there were a few gay themed books). Typical titles for Greenleaf or BEE were on the order of "Spread wide Wife" "Blackmailed into Swapping" "The Mother Lovers" etc. PET published a specific subset, not often found in the titles found in the Hot Zone - "Wife does Dogs" "Donkey for Daughter" "Horse loving Wife" you get the idea, all the stories had animals being intimate with women or girls. None of them, as I recall, involved whipping, or submission - popular themes in the Hot Zone - though there were a few titles such as "Chained Cheerleaders" or "Chained Wife" that involved the female being tied up. Sometime in the 70's, a wanabee adult/science fiction author (Richard E. Geis by name - though doubtful if any of you show know of him) complained in his zine (self published fan magazine - something that was popular at that time - think blog published by mimeograph) that there was no market for new "adult" books, since at the rate there were being published - two to three a month - the publishing houses had enough material that it would take over twenty years to run through their inventory - at which time they could start over as an entirely new audience would have grown up, who would never have seen the earlier books. Several years ago someone put a torrent on demonoid titled 700 adult books. As I recall it took several days to download and when opened there were all those half remembered titles. There were some duplicates, but the total number of unique titles did amount to about 700 - so Richard was correct - the publishers had so many titles that they did not need to buy any new works, all they had to do was wrap a new cover around an old m****cript and there was a new generation of pervs who would think it a new book, while the older generation of pervs would have forgotten they had seen it before!