Fun Gift Book

Beautifully designed by Bill Smith, this gorgeous oversize quality paperback from Feral House (the folks who brought you Fraternity of Shame and The Moloch of Marihuana) is a hoot and a stumble down memory lane. While we now enjoy this exploitative genre for its campy kitsch, gloriously bad writing, and outlandish misinformation, drugs-oriented paperbacks were once an important medium with a perversely seductive quality.

Dope Menace: The Sensational World of Drug Paperbacks, 1900-1972, by Stephen J. Gertz, collects hundreds of fabulously lurid covers, from turn-of-the-last-century tomes about the opium trade, to works about the beatnik glories of reefer smoking and William S. Burroughs’ Junkie (1953), to the spaced-out psychedelic ’60s.

By the way, the cover of Dope Menace originally appeared on 1950’s Vice Rackets of Soho, by Roland Vane. The art was done by Reginald Heade, acclaimed as “probably the best British ‘girlie’ paperback cover artist of the 1950s.”