Items

• One for the gods : a novel
  The second book in the Peter and Charlie trilogy by Gordon Merrick (1916-1988) and the couple, now a decade into their relationship, move from the South of France to Greece. The copy on display is the original Bernard Geis Associates edition from 1971. The cover design, by Roy E. LaGrone, is of a sculpted Greek head rendered in black ink against a red background, overlaid with large, sans-serif white lettering. It lends the book a serious air – this could be a historical novel or a textbook – at odds both with its content and with the smouldering pulp covers of later Merrick editions, as published by Avon Books. Bernard Geis was also responsible for Jacqueline Susann’s ‘The Valley of the Dolls’ in 1966, one of the bestselling novels in publishing history.
• The vampires
  This novel is the second by Mexican-American author John Rechy (1931-) to be seized during the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids. The vampires of the title are metaphorical, as a disparate group of people gather on a Caribbean island and unleash their darkest desires via Satanic rituals and witchcraft. The novel is filmic in style and has a character list which includes actresses, priests (Voodoo and Catholic), a “madam”, a possibly murderous male sex worker and “a drug goddess”. In one of their catalogues, Philadelphia gay bookstore Giovanni’s Room described this novel as a departure for Rechy, particularly as it was “non-gay”, although ‘Gay Times’ noted it still had enough in the contents to be interesting to gay readers.