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| A reader prepares to enjoy Tod's First Time from 1972. |
Thevis Like Us
And there were Pendulum's X-rated films, including not only features like Ed Wood's Necromania but also hundreds if not thousands of 8mm home market loops. Ed wrote subtitles for these short silent films sold through mail order. He wrote the box cover and catalog summaries for them, too, and contributed in as-yet-undiscovered ways to their making.
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| A kingpin of the porn biz. |
Pendulum's magazines, though, are the constant throughline in the last decade or so of Ed Wood's life. Ed unequivocally wrote across hundreds and hundreds of issues, sometimes using his own name, other times working pseudonymously or anonymously. Eventually, Pendulum Publishing morphed into Calga, then Gallery Press. The company also spawned offshoot imprints like Edusex and Libra Press, in addition to churning out generic "triple-dot" magazines (identifiable because of the tall-tale ellipsis on the cover). The Pendulum empire finally reached its zenith with the multimedia Swedish Erotica franchise, comprised of both pornographic loops and magazines.
The Pendulum story is a long and involving one that we have been chipping away at, one week at a time, in these articles. But we have thus far neglected the genesis of the company. No more. It's a story that starts with a colorful yet infamous businessman named Michael George Thevis, born in 1932 in Raleigh, North Carolina.
A key figure at the dawn of the Golden Age of Porn in the 1960s, Thevis rapidly grew his company, Peachtree Books of Atlanta, into a major distributor of adult magazines and paperbacks. By the end of the decade, he had diversified his enterprise into a multimedia porn conglomerate. Pendulum Publishing, also originally based in Atlanta, grew out of Thevis' Peachtree operation.
Seeking to expand his geographical reach and increase in-house production, Thevis bankrolled a Southern California branch for Pendulum. Placed in charge of that operation was Bernie Bloom, who at that time had been a managing editor for a preeminent West Coast mag distributor and sometimes-publisher called Golden State News Ed was already working for Bernie at GSN, writing both paperbacks (many still not identified) and texts for magazines. Incorporating Pendulum's Los Angeles operation in the spring of 1968, Bernie hired Ed first. Their first products for Pendulum were Ed Wood's illustrated paperbacks Raped in the Grass (1968) and Bye Bye Broadie (1968).
The Pendulum story is a long and involving one that we have been chipping away at, one week at a time, in these articles. But we have thus far neglected the genesis of the company. No more. It's a story that starts with a colorful yet infamous businessman named Michael George Thevis, born in 1932 in Raleigh, North Carolina.
A key figure at the dawn of the Golden Age of Porn in the 1960s, Thevis rapidly grew his company, Peachtree Books of Atlanta, into a major distributor of adult magazines and paperbacks. By the end of the decade, he had diversified his enterprise into a multimedia porn conglomerate. Pendulum Publishing, also originally based in Atlanta, grew out of Thevis' Peachtree operation.
Seeking to expand his geographical reach and increase in-house production, Thevis bankrolled a Southern California branch for Pendulum. Placed in charge of that operation was Bernie Bloom, who at that time had been a managing editor for a preeminent West Coast mag distributor and sometimes-publisher called Golden State News Ed was already working for Bernie at GSN, writing both paperbacks (many still not identified) and texts for magazines. Incorporating Pendulum's Los Angeles operation in the spring of 1968, Bernie hired Ed first. Their first products for Pendulum were Ed Wood's illustrated paperbacks Raped in the Grass (1968) and Bye Bye Broadie (1968).
Thevis' Atlanta operation also produced illustrated socio-sex paperbacks that served as templates for the ones Bernie Bloom would later produce in Los Angeles. (It was Bernie's innovation to use T.K. Peters' work as source material.) Meanwhile, the Atlanta publisher also released numerous gay-themed magazines, including the one I'll be discussing this week.
Judging by the handful of magazines I have been able to locate, Pendulum's Atlanta branch had no writing staff to speak of in 1972. These issues typically consist of photos only -- no captions, no editorials, no stories. But Tod's First Time, a one-time only "stroke book" from that same year, is an anomaly in that it includes a freewheeling (read: inebriate) text. Who could have written it? Keep in mind that some of Pendulum's early Los Angeles output still carries the Atlanta address.
In any event, the text from Tod's First Time is presented below, spelling and other typographical errors intact, for the first time in 45 years. Read it for yourself.
