Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Paperback Odyssey, Part Eight by Greg Dziawer

This week, Greg delves once again into those pesky paperbacks.

angora (noun)

(aŋ-ˈgȯr-ə)

1.  the hair of the Angora goat or Angora rabbit 

2.  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.