Sleazy Sixties Sex Books

01 Apr, 2025

On Bluesky, Anton J Pierce spends a lot of time posting 1960s erotica book covers with the caption “Erotica book covers ain’t what they used to be”. And he’s not wrong; many of these covers are incredible. For example:

A lot of these were painted by Robert Bonfils, who was responsible for many of the covers from Playtime Books and Greenleaf Classics. During the heyday of sex publishing he was producing around 50 covers every single month, which is an astonishing output. I think the pace shows in the technical quality of the work - and if you look at enough of his pieces you’ll see the same poses and compositions crop up time and time again, which is very much a facet of working at this sort of pace - but despite that there’s a quality in his work that I can’t really pin down that speaks to me.

Looking at these last night, I went down a rabbit hole learning about the “sleaze” books of the 1960s that culminated in me buying the book ‘Sin-a-rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties’. I have no idea when this will turn up at my house.

Much of the archiving of these books that takes place online is focused on their covers - there’s a massive Flickr library of Bonfils specifically, and a website dedicated to Greenleaf Classics, to name just two of these efforts. But what is sorely lacking (at least as far as I can see) is any sort of archive of the actual text of these cheap, mass-produced, probably-very-bad novels. And I desperately want to read some of them.

I also want to write at least one book in this sort of style, with this sort of cover, just for fun. (Though I’d probably include some actual hardcore sex, which these publishers couldn’t print at the time, because sex is fun to both read and write.) I don’t know how long this fascination is going to last for me, but I’m going to try and track down at least one of these books to read. And if you can point me in the direction of any resources to help with this, please let me know!

(Originally this post was cut off here, forcing you to go to Patreon to read the whole thing. That feels incredibly cynical of me, frankly, and so I've updated this post with the rest of the text. But since Bear doesn't have comments, I'm still going to direct you to Patreon if you'd like to leave a comment on this post..)