SF literary history .... and porn.

The perils of research!

So, I just spent the last hour browsing a website called SLEAZE, which specializes on pornographic books from the 1960s. It has listings, covers, and all that good bibliographic information.

My foray really is research, too. One of the Futurians who never much amounted to anything, John Michel, wrote several porn books in the early 1960s under the name "Louis Richard". They had titles like And Sex is the Payoff (Beacon, 1962) and Artist's Woman (Beacon, 1963). According to  Damon Knight in The Futurians, Michel got this gig through the Scott Meredith Literary Agency (SMLA). That's important because SMLA is the most important agency to ever represent sciene-fiction writers.

And according to Barry Malzberg's Breakfast in the Ruins, the FBI even started investigating Meredith for his role in the porn trade (pornography then being illegal). Except they didn't have a picture of Meredith, so he told his employees to lie about him being in Europe, and he kept dodging the FBI agents until they got bored and went away.

So that's been *my* afternoon. How has YOUR day gone?

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P.S. Apparently John Michel -- a piece of work himself -- never cared for Scott Meredith, whose real name was "Arthur Scott Feldman." So Michel privately called him Scott Feebleman.

If you think that's nasty, though, you should read Malzberg's account of the SMLA, which he worked at for decades. A bitter and damning portrait. 

PPS. On a personal note (and this is completely random), when I was a teenager, I read Meredith's book Writing to Sell over Christmas break during my senior year of high school ... and it so inspired me that I wrote and completed the fantasy novel I'd been working on the last four years. That would have been in 1997. So all these decades, I've had a strong -- but, apparently, entirely misplaced -- affection for Scott Meredith.