Panic First, Figure It Out Later: Research Dead Ends and Other Disclaimers

I actually have checked out the new web page posting system and it works fine. It’s not perfect and I am not sure if it is always going to be compatible with the old pages, but it works for now and that’s more than I expected. What I need is a new domain and a new front page to link everything to. Once I have that and can get everything to reflect back, I am fairly much set.

I just finished the side bar on Western Pulps called “Does and Oats” and am going to link it into the Escape History Corner page once I have the whole Real Nazi Sex UFO Man-Eater Cults feature all stapled down. There will be two other side bars, one dealing with pulp smut and the other with covers featuring women in Nazi outfits. Does and Oats was a pure test of the lay out system and doesn’t have that much to do with the body of my feature. The other two are germane, but tangential. After that, it’s a wrap for a while.

While doing this last feature I have hit several dead zones. A dead zone is a place of contradictory information wherein the sources that you find speaking on a subject are making their pronouncements out of their bung hole. Or from a very conveniently narrow perspective. The three zones I found were on the history of romance fiction, the history of men’s magazines and the history of scandal rags.

Before I go on, I should say that there is nothing worse than a person who has comprehensive knowledge of a small subject. Invariably the first words out of their face is “Contrary to what has been said, blah blah blah.” In short, I am right and everyone else is wrong. I am guilty of this myself. The problem with this sort of testimony is that the general reader has no idea of the context of what you are talking about in the first place, so mentioning any controversy is of limited informative value. But golly, golly are some of these guys flat out wrong.

Let’s take popular romance fiction. Where did it start? Would you believe that it started with Avon paperbacks? Or that Avon paperbacks is responsible for anything other than an occasional rash? How about the 1930s paperback publishing house Mills and Boon? Let’s try the Romantic Period (1815-1910), wherein the novel as a form first starts to emerge. And all of the novels from the romantic period are what kind of novels? It starts with an ‘R’. But no, let’s blow that off along with the Brontes and Jane Austen and skip ahead to Mills and Boon and Avon stinking paperbacks. And let’s forget that, even from context, the Brontes and Jane Austen are mocking the mass produced fiction of their time. Meaning that there was some.

Now mind you, all I am looking for is some evidence that 1800s era Story Papers in the United States carried popular romantic fiction. I am quite aware that from the Renaissance on, there is a fairly unbroken history of popular fiction in all of its stripes in England. I am looking for a line of history here in the United States. I have a two sentence blurb from one source that says they carried it and I have now gone through many, many story paper reproductions and have found the word ‘romance’ listed once. And I have more information about the down on its luck crappy Avon paperbacks company than I, or any human, will ever need. “Avon was the first to commission an independently standing modern setting romance novel.” Not only inconsequential, but wrong.

Let’s take porn. The internet is all about the porn. Surely accurate information can be found on a subject so close to the internet’s heart. “Pornography started to be mass produced in the 1880s, thanks to innovations in half tone printing.” Nice. I’m starting to wonder if the printer’s lobby is paying people off. I will file that away with “steam-driven, sheet fed presses” in my catalog of facts which actually mean nothing. Half tone printing is wonderful and everything, and the guy is only about ten years off on its introduction, but it sort of ignores the fact that Civil War soldiers had tons of porn on them at all times. That’s mid 1860s, for those of you without a history book. There were plenty of ways of reproducing sepia tone images, available widely from the 1840s on. What half tone printing has to do with jack squat is beyond me. This same writer then goes on to tout the innovations of Penthouse Magazine of all things. Something about how Penthouse posed its models in such a way that they seemed unaware of the camera, seemingly caught in a personal moment. Oh good gravy. That’s a throwback to the way porn was normally posed. Worse, there’s now some woman who is doing an eight volume history of men’s magazines and within three lines of her intro blurb, she’s wrong. She’s classifying the entire Spicy trend as being male oriented when it actually started in the female magazines. And she would know this if she did one bit of newspaper research. I think I will take a pass on Volumes 2 through 8, also.

Finally, there were the scandal rags. We have very good records of one from the 1840s. It says it has a lot of competitors, but there’s really no record of them. As I will explain in Real Nazi Sex UFO Man-Eater Cults, these papers are somewhat related to the porn industry, and as such, have fairly spotty records. I am even having problems tracking down the history of some of the more modern Scandal papers. Other than the Enquirer, we don’t have much to go on.

Obviously, I can’t know everything. When it comes to sources, I just have to use the context of what I already know as a filtering agent. And if I am spouting off something that’s just my own silly idea, I should be clear and signpost it. As you will see in Real Nazi Sex UFO Man-Eater Cults, I have plenty of silly ideas.