Dope Menace: The Sensational World of Drug Paperbacks, 1900-1975

"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.

Dope Menace 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.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Feral House
Published: 12/01/2008
ISBN: 9781932595345
Pages: 219
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.80h x 6.50w x 0.60d

Review Citations: New York Times Book Review 12/07/2008 pg. 35
Village Voice 12/17/2008 pg. 42