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| Is this Ed Wood book from 1973 worth your time in 2025? |
Ed Wood wrote many (!) books between 1963 and 1977, both fiction and nonfiction, but very few of them are in print and readily available to the public today. Despite (or maybe because of) this scarcity, interest in Ed's written work remains high among fans. Dedicated Woodologists still want to study these forbidden volumes, especially after they've read Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992), which contains a lengthy and detailed bibliography section, complete with tantalizing cover art and lurid quotes from the original paperbacks. Subsequent books like Muddled Mind: The Complete Works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (2001) and Ed Wood's Sleaze Paperbacks (2013) have also focused on Ed's colorful and prolific writing career.
This has created a strangely persistent gray market on sites like Amazon and Ebay. Independent, small-time publishers with no legal claim to Ed Wood whatsoever will boldly put out their own editions of Eddie's books. The prices for such reissues, although not necessarily cheap, are substantially less than you'd pay for actual vintage paperbacks from the 1960s and '70s. The estate of Kathy Wood, Ed's widow, has tried to put a stop to this practice, but it's like a never-ending game of Whack-A-Mole. You knock one down, and another has already popped up.