By RICHARD E. GEIS (Loompanics Unlimited; 1985)
Pornographic fiction is, obviously, a dead format. That’s why this book, which as its title makes clear was intended as a serious guide for aspiring adult book scribes, reads best nowadays as an enjoyable flashback to a more sexually frank era. A dispatch from the late, notorious Loompanics Unlimited (an outfit known for putting out how-to manuals on torture and overthrowing the government), HOW TO WRITE PORNO BOOKS FOR FUN AND PROFIT was penned by a guy who really knew of what he wrote: Richard E. Geis (1927-2013), who claims to have authored over 120 fuck books.
Geis expends a fair amount of ink reminiscing about the good old days of XXX fiction, which was in decline when this book was published. As Geis despairingly mentions early on in this book, only two adult book publishers existed in 1985: Carlyle Communications and Greenleaf Classics (mailing addresses are provided for each—this, remember, was the pre-internet era), both of which are now defunct.
Also included is a brief history of smut fiction, which began in the early 1960s, when descriptions tended to be chaste and dirty words forbidden. Things got steadily rawer toward the end of the decade, and by the early 1970s authors could be as explicit as they wanted, provided they included a strong story line with psychological underpinnings. That all changed as porno novel readership diminished over the course of decade, to the point that by 1985 the only thing readers wanted was “a series of very graphic, very gross sex acts. One after another…” Furthermore, “medical terms for sex organs are out. Cunt and pussy, “fuckhole” and “fuckslit” are in. Cock, prick, and “fuckmeat” or “fuckpole” are in.”
In addition to pithy pen and ink cartoon illustrations by Alexis A. Gilliland, Geis fills out the book with lengthy excerpts from his past novels (whose titles include MOUTH GIRL, STAR WHORES and THE BIG SUCK) to illustrate his theses—or at least pad his text to 76 pages. Those excerpts, needless to say, tend to involve especially saucy descriptions (“My world was David’s loins”…“His own hands ranged over her big, fat tits”…“Betty loved the way jism tasted when it squirted out of the nob and down her throat”), meaning this book ultimately reads like one of the publications it describes: cut-rate and unabashedly X-rated, with value as a historic rather than strictly erotic relic.