"
Dope Menace
boasts hundreds of full color images from the wicked subgenre of drug-exploitation narratives... The covers that made these authors books so easy to pick up are collected here for the first time, in all their seductive and transgressive glory."—
Tucson Weekly
While we now enjoy this exploitative genre for its campy kitsch, gloriously bad writing, and outlandish misinformation, drug paperback books were once a transgressive medium with a perversely seductive quality.
collects together hundreds of fabulously lurid and collectible covers in color, from xenophobic turn-of-the century tomes about the opium trade to the beatnik glories of reefer smoking and William S. Burroughs’
Junkie
to the spaced-out psychedelic ’60s. We mustn’t forget the gonzo paranoia brought on by Hunter S. Thompson in the ’70s, when anything was everything.
Author
Stephen J. Gertz
is a well-regarded authority on antiquarian books and contributor to Feral House’s
Sin-A-Rama
, an award-winning visual history of sleaze paperbacks from the sixties.
Annie Nocenti
, longtime editor of
High Times
magazine, offers an informative foreword.