Once again, the topics were overhyped with racy new titles and voluptuous cover illustrations. Wood-ford Press sold paperback rights for numerous Woodford titles to Avon topics and other purveyors of softcover sensationalism. Woodford then found a final burst of success in the new popular fiction venue of the mass-market paperback. Flattering the author-and recognizing his marketability-the new firm was called Jack Woodford Press, and the topics sold well, especially to servicemen. In the ’40s, a publishing concern headed by Allen Wilson went into partner ship with Woodford to repackage the old erotica titles and some new ones. These eminently readable and practical guides, such as Trial and Error, were considered bibles for a generation of would-be writers. In addition to his sex pulp novels, Woodford wrote several volumes of “how-to” topics on the art and craft of writing and getting published. Nonetheless, Woodford’s novels were often banned by court edict and seized by police and vigilante groups who raided offending bookstores well into the 1960s, and people went to jail for selling his work.

One could comb through some of Woodford’s supposedly sexy topics-and those of other lending-library sex-pulp authors-without finding anything even remotely juicy, and none of the topics were ever as exciting or explicit as their provocative titles or jackets. The readers, in any case, did not seem to demand more than a hint of naughty intentions. Woodford’s tone was not sophisticated or decadent in the manner of the Edwardian erotica writers, but contemporary and wised-up about intimate matters between guys and dames. In topics like Her First Sin, Unmoral, and Three Gorgeous Hussies, Woodford represented the new generation of depression-era, American erotica writers whose work was aimed not at the sophisticated connoisseurs of earlier years but at lower- and middle-class readers, male and female, who were willing to pay the 4-cent lending-library fee for some entertainment and escapism.

Under his various names, Woodford churned out dozens of mildly risque “modern” novels that touched on matters of unwed passion and sexual experimentation. In the lending libraries and bookstores of the 1930s and 1940s, a topic jacket with Woodford’s name on it-or one of his pseudonyms-guaranteed something a little more spirited than the average read. Jack Woodford, to those willing to admit such knowledge, was once a brand name in the peculiar subgenre of popular literature whose goal was the reader’s erotic stimulation. (1894-1971) Also wrote as: Sappho Henderson Britt

Vice Versa by Jack Woodford