Tuesday 3 March 2009

xNovel!


Here's a sleazy one - a site called xNovel, featuring PDFs and cover scans of classic adult novels! And it's free. You can even torrent all 1300+ novels at a go, if you like. xNovel is searchable, and is arranged by date (of entry to the collection, not publication), author, and (my favourite) series.

As cinematic porn was in robust full bloom during the 70s and 80s, you may well ask why people bothered reading their smut? Different strokers and all that, but it is interesting to note that three fetishes keep coming up over and over again in this deluge of engorged sex paragraphs and amusing social justification.

These three fetishes, oddly enough, are big targets for prosecution when they're depicted onscreen (so, as we've seen before, mediums restrict/determine content, and because of this may in turn cause other mediums with differing restrictions/determinations to be produced. It's the same reason you see so many pairs of tight white underwear on these paperback covers).

The fetishes in question are: incest, S&M, and bestiality.

The later was the biggest shock in looking over these old whackbacks; it never ceases to amaze me what a market there was for this sort of thing in the late 70s/early 80s. In fact, I would like to examine that in some greater detail - but we'll save that for another post [Here that is, by the way!].

For the moment, here's some very sleazy (non bestiality-related) covers from xNovel's collection. Almost certainly not safe for work.

Incest themed -







the hard stuff -






Even incest combined with S&M -



Like porn films, these book covers often emphasize watching, the kink of voyeurism - which, as film watchers or book readers, we too are taking part in.


Similarly, one feature of these covers I love is that of the shocked observer. They let us feel the agony with the ecstasy, the shock with the titillation, the shame with the joy. Everybody wins. Here's a few good examples.




Sometimes the shock comes from the innuendo...



...sometimes from the utter lack thereof.


There's an awful lot of sucking going on.









Plenty of word play.




In some cases, a picture really is worth a thousand words. What has this poor girl done to earn such ridicule? Suggest heavy petting as a viable alternative?


Can you believe there was a paperback adult novel called Glory Hole Cop?


And finally -



DON"T MISS THE SEQUEL TO THIS BARRAGE --
THE BESTIALITY EDITION!!!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post. It'd be interesting to know about the folks who actually wrote these things. I assume it's just a handful churning them out under different names. For example, how many of the authors listed as female were actually female? Who knows. Maybe, like those Accept lyrics, they were all penned by a women. The fact of the matter is that to fill/kill that much space is a pretty incredible chore, especially on a manual typewriter. It got me thinking of Crad Kilodney's stint at Rustler.

I also find it amazing that someone would take the time to scan and catalogue them all.

Pius said...

Lots of good questions, to which I have no real answers.

I do know that Olympia were supposed to have various writers and artists writing porn for them under aliases. Wikipedia mentions Tor Kung, Ann Fettamin, and Frank Newman. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it were a widespread phenomenon.

Bill Ward (who deserves his own post here) did illustrations for at least one series of adult novels. I have a copy of "Spanish Anyone?", which Ward did pictures for.

And yes, it is a huge amount of work. xNovel is fairly obviously a real labour of love. I hope the site is able to find a wider audience as word spreads of its treasures.

Unknown said...

best bestiality author: jon reskind aka Jeffery A Wallman a western novalist who made extra dough as a porn author ref his ceasar series. lot of great sf authors started out as $750 up front $750 on delivery req'd 12 chapters with at lest 3 references to make the text socially redeeming