Dope Menace

The Sensational World of Drug Paperbacks

Stephen J Gertz

Lurid covers, often gloriously bad writing, outlandish misinformation … what’s not to love? Throughout the 20th century, book publishers exploited our secret desire to escape social straitjackets and succumb to a world of irresponsibility and total sensation. Dope Menace unleashes these demonic angels again for a wicked curtain call. “Dope Menace is a time-travelers’ dream trip to the 1950s newsstand. This invaluable introduction to drug- and sex-fueled literature is heady yet sobering: a reminder of the impact these books once had, on both the avid readers of cheap paperbacks and on the indignant crusaders against such pulps.” — Barbara Hodgson, author of Opium: A Portrait of the Heavenly Demon

Erik Jan Hanussen

Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant

By Mel Gordon

The man who provided psychic salve for Hitler had something to hide.

Extreme Islam

Anti-American Propaganda of Muslim Fundamentalism

Edited by Adam Parfrey

Confronts the reader with important and rarely-seen perspectives of a movement that opposes almost everything considered holy by American and Western civilization.

15 to Life

How I Painted My Way to Freedom

By Anthony Papa, with Jennifer Wynn

A call for reform of the destructive laws of the War on Drugs.

The Garden of Peculiarities

By Jesús Sepúlveda

The Garden of Peculiarities is considered by major anarchist thinkers to be the primary twenty-first century anarchist essay, in the way that Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle influenced political thought in the late twentieth century.

Hollywood’s Hellfire Club

The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and “The Bundy Drive Boys”

By Gregory William Mank
With Charles Heard and Bill Nelson

They carried on like pirates, pranked like the Marx Brothers and had dark sides worthy of Dracula. They were the Bundy Drive Boys — hard-drinking, brilliantly-talented, world-famous men of golden age Hollywood. John Barrymore, W. C. Fields, and Errol Flynn all roistered at the Bundy Drive studio of the profane artist John Decker. All were hell-bent on scaring away film industry boogeymen even while creating sordid monsters of their own.

It’s a Man’s World

Men’s Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps

By Adam Parfrey, with contributions from Bruce Jay Friedman, Josh Alan Friedman, Mort Kunstler, David Saunders, Bill Devine

Looks back at the last great run of pop illustrations, at least as brilliant as pulp’s best.

Jim Goad’s Gigantic Book of Sex

By Jim Goad

The author of the notorious ‘zine ANSWER Me!, Shit Magnet (Feral House), and the best-selling Redneck Manifesto (Simon & Schuster) lampoons every imaginable aspect of human sexuality in 224 hilarious, illustrated, full-color, R-rated pages.

Kooks

A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief

By Donna Kossy

“A rich compendium of looniness.”

This newly expanded version includes a profile on hollow-earth activist Ruth Leedy, a letter to Richard Nixon from St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital, scientific proof of God, and other material culled from the author’s archives.

Love Sex Fear Death

The Inside Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment

by Timothy Wyllie
Edited by Adam Parfrey

The Process Church of the Final Judgment was the apocalyptic shadow side of the flower-powered ’60s and perhaps the most notorious cult of modern times. Scores of black-cloaked devotees swept the streets of New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, Rome, Chicago, Toronto, Boston, New Orleans and other cities selling magazines with titles like Sex, Fear, Love and Death.