Ed Wood's Sleaze Paperbacks

Ed Wood was a filmmaker who ironically enough has gained a cult following as "the worst director of all time." In the '50s, he made low budget films with incredible technical errors, corny specal effects, ill-fitting stock footage, bad dialogue, crappy casting and just ridiculous plots. As he descended into career oblivion and alcoholism, he wrote equally outrageous pornography novels under a variety of pseudonyms. Frank friends Boo Hooray Gallery in NYC are holding an exhibition called Ed Wood's Sleaze Paperbacks.

The antiquarian mystique surrounding Edward Davis Wood Jr.’s career as an author of pornographic pulp fiction is legend.

He wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, books were published and re-published under different titles, and occasionally under different author names. The paperbacks are truly rare, even in an age of mass-searchable used book engines, and google ferocity.

Ed Wood’s sleaze fiction is also as strange, idiosyncratic and out of step with his times and mores as his infamous movies. Wood would write porn inter-spliced with lengthy philosophical, sociological and psychological discourse, he’d write first person narratives of life as a transvestite in the buttoned up America of the 1950’s.

His descent into alcoholism and poverty was mirrored by the publishers that employed him. Towards the end of his life he wrote pornography with decreasing amounts of the strange flourishes of his eccentric personality.

He died in 1978 of an alcohol-induced heart attack. His friends say the porn killed him.

This is the largest assembly of Ed Wood publications exhibited to date. Boo-Hooray has tracked down roughly seventy of his books and publications. Some collectors claim that he wrote dozens more.

Entrepreneurial book dealers often indulge in Ed Wood pseudonym speculation. A ten dollar paperback can thus become an antiquarian rarity, even with flimsy or non-existent evidence. A handful of these are in the show. The collection has been sold to the Cornell University rare book library where it will become a part of their human sexuality archive.

CURATED BY MICHAEL DALEY AND JOHAN KUGELBERG
EXHIBIT OPEN EVERYDAY 11AM-6PM
Wed, Nov 2nd to Thu Dec 1st.
Exhibition opening night will be Nov. 2nd 6-9
Please RSVP to attend
Catalog and Deluxe Edition available in Webshop ORDER NOW
Boo-Hooray 265 Canal St, #601, New York, NY 10013