"Classics"

I'm something of a sucker for series of "classic" books, so it was that word that first caught my eye about the Greenleaf Classics from the 1960s and 1970s. Of course, reading the cover blurbs and titles, it quickly became apparent that the word was used so loosely (as in bowels) as to be utterly meaningless, but for a short while I thought I had at least discovered a forgotten source of intriguing cover illustrations that might not have looked out of place on Penguins of the same era...

 

 

 A very short while, as it turned out, as this is the sort of thing that seems more typical of their output:

 

  

To be fair, those are actually quite witty for a sleaze publisher. More typical of Greenleaf's output are these things:

 

Oh, those sexy saucer people. Sorry, I was confused.

 

Yes. Yes, it does.

Even these are positively artistic masterpieces compared to later Greenleaf books, which tended to be called straightforward things like Horny Aunt, and have a tatty softcore photo on the front.

In tracking down these covers, I also discovered a previously unknown (to me) field of exploitation pulp: the Vietnam War pornographic paperback. In retrospect, I should guessed there'd be such a thing--the whole men-in-uniform/sex/violence/war-crimes/brutality/Asian-women-fetish nexus must have been too big a market to ignore.