Here in the desert, no era is celebrated more than the midcentury period. The hair, the chairs, the architecture. It was a breakthrough time with many new ideas coming to the fore. Ike was president, and new homes and highways were sprouting up everywhere.

Nonetheless, there were a few harbingers of the following decade when all bets were off and many people weren’t as straight-laced as they appeared. One of those was the emergence of the sleaze sex paperback with its steamy prose and steamier cover art. That art has become increasingly collectible, politically incorrect as it is today, and a small but growing cadre of enthusiasts are hunting it down. Here’s the backstory.

The trend began around 1958 when a hiccup in the distribution of science fiction magazines caused a number of publications to fold up their tents. At the time, sci-fi writing was a popular career for many up-and-coming authors as it required little more than a vivid imagination and a familiarity with Jules Verne. It paid well too, but suddenly it was gone.

Those in the trade looked around for new outlets and discovered that one fast-emerging field with a need for writers was sleaze publishing. These paperbacks made no pretense to being literature but relied on sensational full-color cover art and a 50,000-word formatted story to sell. And sell they did.

Pretty soon, a substantial number of sci-fi writers began cranking out sleaze novels, and the pay proved even better than science fiction. Some could deliver two novels a month and were paid upwards of $1,200 apiece by eager publishers, a near fortune in the early 1960s.

While censorship in America still prohibited the publication of such classic erotic novels as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer, sleaze writers developed a whole new category of euphemisms that skirted the bounds of allowable language. Publishers such as Nightstand Books, Scarlet Readers and a dozen others ran their presses day and night to keep up with demand. New titles had a 30-day shelf life, after which they were replaced by a slightly altered version of the same thing. The big difference was in the cover art.

By the 1960s, illustration art was in decline. Books and magazines had turned to photography to ornament their covers, and the quality of lithographic reproduction had improved in its consistency. Illustrators, many of whom were classically trained and experts in anatomical art, needed another venue in which to exercise their talents. For some, sleaze cover work was the answer.

Illustrators such as Bill Edwards, John Healey and Doug Weaver — all accomplished artists — painted dozens of sleaze covers, although many went unsigned or marked with pseudonyms to avoid harassment and prosecution. Weaver used the parrot “Sebastian” as the artist’s signature on many of his works, and those are highly collectible today.

Given the usual anonymity of both writer and artist, sleaze sex novels sold primarily by virtue of their covers. Furtive patrons could select a book by its cover and leave without stopping to inspect its story line. The art was colorful, graphic and highly suggestive without being explicit. Often, the cover art had little if anything to do with the narrative.

All the same, the prodigious talents of many of the artists who created such works were clearly on display, and that’s why these illustrations have become so popular today. They may not be for your living room, but original sleaze art is a fascinating and still affordable category that has gained new adherents in recent years. Whenever they turn up in galleries like ours, they always go quick.

Mike Rivkin and his wife, Linda, are longtime residents of Rancho Mirage. For many years, he was an award-winning catalogue publisher and has authored seven books, along with countless articles. Now, he’s the owner of Antique Galleries of Palm Springs. His antiques column appears Saturdays in The Desert Sun. Want to send Mike a question about antiques? Drop him a line at info@silverfishpress.com.

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