Dope Menace: The Sensational World of Drug Paperbacks
by: Stephen J. Gertz

Softcover. Port Townsend WA, Feral House., 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wraps, 220 pages. 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 glory. 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. Clean copy.