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| This week, Greg delves once again into those pesky paperbacks. |
angora (noun)(aŋ-ˈgȯr-ə)
1. the hair of the Angora goat or Angora rabbit2. yarn, fabric or a garment made from this hair.
Ed Wood famously had an angora fetish. If there is something close to a fingerprint in Ed's writing, it's this soft, furry fabric. In fact, angora shows up ubiquitously in many of Ed's known adult paperbacks and is present in the vast majority of them.
Early last year, I began performing fishing expeditions into the world of adult paperbacks, predicated on the notion there are still unknown paperbacks written by Ed out there. One of the biggest challenges in this endeavor is finding the right stream in which to cast my net. I've never seen a total of how many adult paperbacks may have been written and published during the genre's heyday—roughly the early '60s through the early '80s—but it is conservatively in the many tens of thousands.
Late last summer, I was lucky to procure sponsorship for a few episodes of the The Ed Wood Summit Podcast from Triple X Books. While that relationship allowed me to get my hands on plenty of e-books, it unexpectedly resulted in a winnowing process. When I communicated with the proprietor of the site, he was curious about my endeavor to ID unknown works by Ed Wood. He graciously offered to search the entire text database of over 18,000 adult paperbacks offered on the site. Naturally, angora was one of the terms he searched for.
Not counting any of Ed Wood's known works—just a handful of Ed's verified titles are offered by Triple X—the result totaled a mere 118 paperbacks (roughly 0.65555555555556%) mentioning angora. I have been combing through that list, hoping to find one novel written by Ed. It's a daunting task, but I'm encouraged by a discovery I made prior to receiving the list: Raoul Woody's Sex Salvation. This novel validated my gut feeling that there's more Ed out there.
My findings thus far indicate that there were just a handful of writers who used the term angora with any commonality, albeit with nowhere near Ed Wood's frequency. Let's look at a few of them individually.
Paul Hugo Litwinsky aka Paul Little, Dennis Carlson, and lots of other pseudonyms
One of the most prolific writers ever, with over 700 books to his credit. Paul was a chess champion and wrote about chess often before finally launching headlong into adult paperbacks at the age of 48. Eros Goldstripe's Victims of the Village Wantons, which Paul wrote under the name Dennis Carlson, is one of the titles that mentions angora. In fact, when I first spotted it, my heart began to race at the thought that here was another unknown paperback written by Ed Wood. Ultimately, though, my surmise was that this was not likely. For one thing, Paul was a "better" (read: more orthodox) writer than Ed.
An excerpt:
She sat down, and as she did so, Robin undressed her in his mind. He could imagine the firmness of her tits young and adolescent, that still had enough tension in their upper muscles to pull the gorgeous full globes into ski-run contours. In his mind he saw the wide cleavage, below it the flatness of her unstretched belly, the light brown hairs beginning hesitantly just below the sunken navel, gathering number and length, and he could imagine below them the inviting, hungry cunt, its lips closed for the moment but requiring only the lightest pressure of his experienced hands to open and display their glistening, quivering lips to his pleasure.
He'd been so intent on his own imaginings, as he still reached back with his head to enjoy the pleasures of the long-haired unknown behind him and of the invitingly soft ass of the statuesque black woman on his left, that he had not even noticed what the new girl was wearing. Now he looked more carefully and found she had on a short tweed skirt in heather tones with a matching short-sleeved sweater of mauve angora that showed her peaches-and-cream skin and complexion off to perfection. She seemed somehow incongruous in this setting, more of a high-school cheerleader somewhere in the Middle West, than the sort of girl who fitted in with the depraved erotic mores of this part of the Nation's sex capital.
Andrew Offutt aka John Cleve and many other pseudonyms
Another incredibly prolific paperback author. When he used the word "angora" it was typically when he was writing under the Cleve pseudonym. Most telling of all, when he uses the word—and it's not often proportional to his body of work—he always capitalizes it as Angora.
Another incredibly prolific paperback author. When he used the word "angora" it was typically when he was writing under the Cleve pseudonym. Most telling of all, when he uses the word—and it's not often proportional to his body of work—he always capitalizes it as Angora.
A relevant excerpt from Cleve's Swallow the Leader:
By the end of the basketball season the year I was thirteen, about half the Angora was gone off that fluffy white sweater, all those long silky hairs Davy liked to pull. They were gone off two separate places in front, I mean, where he felt me all the way home from every away-game.
The next year it was mostly Ted Taton, but he always covered us up with his warm-up jacket and sucked, like a baby—and I LOVED it. Funny... it was Bruce Vincent who just squeezed both of 'em that time at the drive-in movie and then slid his hand up under my skirt and rolled his finger back and forth on my clitoris—bless him, where'd he ever learn about that thing?—until I orgasmed so big I thought I had wet my pants.
Victoria Parker
Yet another hugely prolific author. Her work largely appeared at the tail end of the adult paperback's halcyon days, when the books and their themes were incredibly transgressive. The timing also doesn't jibe, as Ed had by then passed. Among numerous books in which the word angora appears, Eager, Balling Schoolgirl (1984) is a representative sample. Here is that book's opening:
Susan Forbes was a sweet, pretty young teenager who was budding into bloom. Her pussy was always hot. She had a beautiful, very petite body that curved in all the right places. She had lithe, shapely legs, the skin smooth, milky; a tiny flat tummy; rich lush hips; and a stunning pair of tits that were rather large for her age but not at all out of place on her fabulous body.
Susan had a dream ass, and she had only recently begun to notice how men looked at it as she walked.
Right about now, you're probably saying to yourself: "Can I get my hands on that list of 118 titles, Greg? I'd sure love to dig deeper." You sure can! It's posted right here. Get lost in it! And when you find an Ed book, let the world know!
Special thanks to my friend James Pontolillo—author of the indispensable Unknown War of Edward D. Wood, Jr. , which debunks all of the WWII Wood military myths—for putting Paul Hugo Litwinsky on my radar. I'd also like to thank Triple X Books for showing me a secret, smaller and shallower pond.