Very educational.
UPDATE: The tremendously wise Derek of True Small Caps has found out some interesting background about these books, and the often genuinely good crime and science-fiction writers behind them. See here.
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Googling around reveals they are all from Greenleaf Publishing, founded by William Lawrence Hamling. Many of his writers were moonlighting science fiction authors.
"Some of those writers were people of the stature of Evan Hunter, Donald Westlake, John Jakes, Lawrence Block, Hal Dresner, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and others but it was the science fiction writers who really shined and dominated the medium...at the beginning, in the middle, and in the end. Writers like Robert Silverberg were routinely turning out from one to three manuscripts per month and some of them, like Silverberg, did that for many, many years continuously. Harlan Ellison made at least one contribution to the black box machine also. As did Avram Davidson, Gil Lamont, Art Plotnik, G.C. Edmundson, and yours truly (the real list, which does not yet exist, would be very long and contain a few names that might surprise some readers)."
Source: http://efanzines.com/EK/eI2/index.htm
Cover artists include "Robert Bonfils, Gene Bilbrew, Eric Stanton, Paul Rader, Ed Smith, Bill Ward, and Doug Weaver."
Source: http://feralhouse.com/press/sin-a-rama
Except the last one, which is from Milton Luro's company American Art Enterprises. The Barclay House imprint specialized in posing its products as serious social studies:
http://www.vintagesleaze.com/catalogs-adult-aa.html
Thank you for finding that information, Derek--it's very helpful (and GENUINELY educational!). I'll link to your comments in the post.
Ah, yes, Milton Luros. I did a bit of research on American Art Enterprises when researching my John Glassco biography (one imprint, Hanover House, published his hoax The Temple of Pederasty). A confusing conglomerate – perhaps intentionally so – according to Reader's Digest, in the mid-sixties AAE was raking in over $20 million dollars annually.
I was going to provide that eFanzines link as well. I ran across that one day, and it's completely fascinating.
Really interesting stuff. There must be many more untold tales from that world that need to be recorded before everyone involved is too old or too dead to talk about it.
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