#paperback library

Cover illustration by Paul Lehr

Steamy Saturday

"No longer young and beautiful . . . flat broke and depressed . . . David wandered lost and lonely in . . . the twilight world of sex."

"When desire overwhelmed him, there was always the occasional man."

"Suddenly three men came into David's life - each offering . . . every kind of erotic adventure."

". . . another unforgettable portrait of the shadow world of forbidden love among men."

"Clearly a novel written for the adult reader . . . of society's most whispered about subjects."

Middle-aged David has been left by his lover of 15 years, which he responds to by drinking and pissing his life away. Because of self-induced financial difficulties, he is forced to move to unsavory digs in New York's lower eastside. In an attempt to revive himself, David seeks solace in a string of "occasional men": the Nordic, no-nonsense Gus; his sweet, but unexciting Black neighbor Hermie; the commanding and experienced 50-year-old Guilio de Groa.

Such is the premise of this fairly-steamy paperback original The Occasional Man by gay romance writer James Barr, pseudonym for the American author and gay activist James Fugaté (1922-1995), published in New York by Paperback Library in 1966. This was Barr's second novel and the last of his four major works, which also include the novel Quatrefoil (1950), the short-story collection Derricks (1951), and the limited-edition play Game of Fools (1955), all of which we hold. While this much-later novel portrays gay sex frankly without being pornographic and has a somewhat satisfying ending, it's a bit melodramatic and lacks some of the dramatic tenderness of Barr's first heralded novel Quatrefoil.

View other gay fiction posts.

View more LGBTQ+ posts.

Vintage Paperback - Beyond The Spectrum by Martin Thomas

This is the Paperback Library collection Jirel of Joiry (1969), which collects (like most Joiry collections) all but one of C. L. Moore’s Jirel stories (omitted is her collaboration with her husband, Henry Kuttner, “Quest of the Starstone”). The cover artist, unfortunately, is unknown.

These stories are alarmingly modern in sensibility, and starkly undercut a lot of escapist power fantasy that folks assume is baked into the genre — doubly shocking considering Jirel is the first female hero of sword and sorcery. The first details Jirel’s first dangerous brush with magic. This underscores the action of the second story, “Black God’s Kiss,” an acknowledged classic. That one see’s Jirel’s kingdom conquered. Rather than submit to the conqueror, who roughly tries to "kiss” her, Jirel attempts to tear his throat out with her teeth. Failing at that, she slips out of her cell and embarks on journey to a dark land accessed through a trap door beneath her castle, a phantasmagoric landscape of forests and mountains that somehow exist underground (in a wonderfully sinister bit, Jirel is initially enclosed in impenetrable darkness until she removes her crucifix). Horrible creatures live there. She seeks out the statue (is it a statue, though?) of the titular god and gives it a kiss, which she carries back and passes along to the conqueror, killing him.

“Black God’s Shadow” forces Jirel to reckon with the consequences of her actions in the previous story in ways that are honestly surprising now, let alone when the story was first published in 1934. “The Dark Land,” probably the weakest of the stories, involves another unwanted suitor. “Hellsgarde,” the final story, is a sinister treasure hunt.

Vintage Paperback - The Red Carillon by Phyllis A. Whitney

Frank Frazetta The Serpent (aka "Aros") Paperback Novel Cover Painting Original Art (Paperback Library, 1967)