Outsider Art Torso Phone

Posted on eBay right now is the creepiest single item I’ve ever come across. It’s a crying skinned hermaphrodite telephone!….I kid you not.


It’s a sculpture of a visible/skinned half-man half-woman with a rotary phone installed inside and the dial exposed on the abdomen. The mouth and ear piece of the phone are in the figure’s head which you lift off the body and speak into.

The body of this life-size sculpture is made from plaster of Paris on a wooden skeleton. The exterior is painted with acrylic paint which has been built up and textured to look like muscle. Exposed bone had been inventively made out of ribbons of hot glue. The figure’s head has male and female features (with lipstick/makeup and styled hair on the feminine side) and both eyes are shedding a tear (who wouldn’t?).

Also, it works! Witness the horror:

I have numerous images on the sale page.

BOOK CSI: Tastiest Book Ever and Porno Proof-Reading

I saw a box of 100+ British Dr. Who pbs for sale this past weekend. I was waffling about trying them on eBay when I picked one up and noticed the telltale 1/8″ bore-holes indicating bookworms. Looking further I found this one which has the highest number of holes I’ve seen on a single book: 13!



3-4 holes in a text block is not uncommon in titles from the 40s and earlier but this book is from 1982! This leads me to conclude that the Doctor Who Crossword book is the most delicious confection ever printed.

Next up a batch of sleaze paperbacks that showed up in the mail. The covers were nice and the bindings were solid but fanning the pages I noticed heavy ink underlining and marginalia. On further investigation I discovered the previous owner had developed an elaborate system to annotate his porn using multi-colored ink, pictograms for particular sex acts and indexes on the inside back cover.

and more (NWS): 1, 2, 3

When reading this type of literature, you’re already reduced to one hand. But when the other hand contains a multicolor hi-lighting pen, it seems you’re missing the point.

Book CSI is a continuing record of the sins against books committed by readers, the elements and time. I’m posting interesting cases as I find them. Please report any noteworthy crimes to our desk man.

Tax Prep Week

…so I’ve barely had time to post. But there’s a new batch of covers in the Pulp Fiction Cover Gallery. This comprises the last of my acquisitions from the Housing Works Geektacular Sale.

Also I picked up a copy of the Warren PB price guide and filled in a lot of “unknown” artists. If you have a favorite, do a name search in my photostream and you’ll likely turn up more than previous.

Hopefully I’ll be rescued and back to posting next week.

A Few New Blogs

…that I’ve been enjoying recently.

Two by the author of an interesting sounding upcoming book “Take me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950” (Dust-to-Digital, April ’09)

Dull Tool, Dim Bulb: “A blog about surface, wear, form and authenticity in art, antiques and photography. Dull tool and dim bulb were the only swear words my father ever used”; with a recent post on Hobo Nickels that has me checking the pockets of every patched up coat I find in a thrift store.


and

Gals Gams and Garters: documenting–one clipping at a time–the scrapbook of a leg and garter aficionado that was dumpster-dived in Virginia in the 60s.


Also collector and archivist Vincent Lexington Harper has built a digital gallery of vintage Asian advertising art called Old Orient Museum. It features tons of vintage tobacco and pin-up advertising (much of which was destroyed during China’s Cultural Revolution). This site’s a little Flash heavy for my taste (though I love the soundtrack) but it’s a rich resource.

I’ll add all three of these to my sidebar link lists.

Dennis Wheatley Bookplate by Frank C. Papé


(click for larger version)

I recently learned that one of my favorite illustrators, Frank C. Papé, did a bookplate for British Horror/Occult author Dennis Wheatley.

Papé did illustrations for a series of Bodley Head editions of allegorical fantasy writers; James Branch Cabell and Anatole France. The plates are vivid, bizarre and frequently use a pseudo-3D technique placing parallel action on different focal planes. To me he looks like a precursor of underground cartoonists Robert Williams and S. Clay Wilson.

I tracked the plate down and I’m very pleased with it. A jazz-age satyr smoking a cigarette with an iced bottle of Champers nearby, nudity, suggestive pagan imagery, a sacrilegious coda, all of my favorite things! Definitely one of the gems of my collection.

I haven’t read Wheatley yet, but if his taste in bookplate artists–and the batshit crazy Hammer adaptation from 1968, Lost Continent–are indicators, I expect to enjoy his work.

Housing Works Geektacular Sale

So I paid the $50 preview fee and there’s no way I was publicizing this before I had my fill–but this weekend (today, NOW) Housing Works bookstore (Crosby Street, Below Houston, NYC) is having a massive Geektacular sale on Comics, Records and Vintage PBs.

5 for a dollar all you can carry away. I was very happy with the PB section, so much that I never made it to the comics or records.

Definitely worth checking out.

Last Minute Save

Was having a really crap book-scouting day yesterday. I hit 4 thrift stores scattered over 5 miles (walked) and found NOTHING for resale. Best I could do was two books for me–Doctor Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books and a salty memoir of a pool hustler for the con artist library, McGoorty: The Story of a Billiard Bum.

Stopped in a last ditch Salvation Army (that’s normally fruitless and that I looked over just the other day). Saw nothing new but I picked up the ONLY book that might possibly contain a bookplate and found this:


Gloria Swanson’s bookplate with a gift inscription!

My first true celebrity bookplate find. Only dilemma now is keep or sell…