Guess who's back in print?

From Amazon's description of Naked Came the Stranger: (Note that book cover as shown is not 100% work-safe!)

"In 1969, a group of reporters at Long Island Newsday decided to have some fun. They were appalled at the poor writing in the then-current bestsellers by Jacqueline Susann, Irving Wallace and Harold Robbins. They decided to have a contest to see who could write on an even lower level of tawdriness.... [T]wenty-four seasoned newsmen and newswomen each wrote one chapter. Fifteen chapters were selected.... The book was presented to a publisher as being written by a 'demure Long Island housewife who thought she could write as well as J. Susann'....

"[T]he book became an international bestseller."

And the rest, as they say, is history. Seattle Weekly describes it thus:

"In 1966, appalled by the best sellers of Jacqueline Susann and others, [editor Mike McGrady] challenged his colleagues at Newsday, where he was a distinguished editor and writer, to perpetrate a book so mindlessly crass it could not fail. 'There will be an unremitting emphasis on sex,' he warned. 'Also, true excellence in writing will be quickly blue-penciled into oblivion....'

"Those ?60s pranksters were not looking to advance their own careers by duping their editors with too-good-to-be-true copy; they were simply trying to spoof the world of crap novels by out-crapping them?and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. "

I'm tempted to buy a copy just so I'll have it handy to brandish in the air whenever I hear the phrase "Give 'em what they want." (See this editorial if that reference is unclear.) But then I'd be in the same position as the unfortunate reviewer at Bookslut who realized too late the horrible doom which she had brought upon herself:

"I asked to review Naked Came the Stranger by "Penelope Ashe" because the concept, as described, seemed like an awful lot of fun.... But when I tore open the envelope containing the book, I realized that in the end, the joke was on me -- because I was going to have to read the damn thing. And about three chapters in, it became pretty clear why everyone drank so much in the '60s."

An after thought: it will be interesting, and perhaps frightening, to see what advertisements Blogger puts at the head of this page after I post a message in which the words "naked" and "sex" appear a half-dozen times.

In unrelated news....

The Reader's Shelf readers-advisory column in the February 1, 2004 issue of Library Journal includes, under the headline of "A Fine Romance : Good Reads for Men", the following recommendation:

"For the man who likes a bit of spice with his romance, John Norman's 25-book series The Chronicles of Gor offers a twist of fantasy, out-of-this-world adventure, and lots of kinky sex. Tarl Cabot is brought up on Earth but finds himself on the planet Gor, where he rescues women from dungeons and dragons, then enslaves them, often falling in love with them along the way...."

In looking through the discussion from the Fiction-L listserv which the columnist apparently mined for this column, I found an actual, and fairly typical, quote from one of Norman's books:

Dancer of Gor by John Norman
"Doreen Williamson appeared to be a quiet shy librarian, but in the dark of the library, after hours, she would practice, semi-nude, her secret studies in belly-dancing. Until, one fateful night, the slavers from Gor kidnapped her."

Dang! Why don't I have any library co-workers like that?!?

The Gor books are in fact popular "spicy" adventure books, and they do have their fans, but their author's frequently reiterations of his philosophy of gender relations mean that a librarian might find that recommending them as "romances" is a bit dicey. Depends on the patron's tastes, I suppose....

Another afterthought: Those Blogger advertisements may have just gotten even more "interesting"!