ED WOOD’S SLEAZE PAPERBACKS
CURATED BY MICHAEL DALEY AND JOHAN KUGELBERG
EXHIBIT OPEN EVERYDAY 11AM-6PM
Wed, Nov 2nd to Thu Dec 1st.
Boo-Hooray Gallery
265 Canal St, #601, New York, NY 10013
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. Multiple authors would share the same pseudonym, and the companies that published the titles weren’t the kind of operations that kept any kind of records, nor paid royalties, nor really existed in the manner that most are to expect of book publishers.
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. He’d riff on psychosexual themes, and unleash his id, his ego and his superego in turn, sometimes in the same chapter. He’d write about sex and the human condition without veneer or filters, offering up the damaged and anguished voice of a desperately soul-searching drunk with a sense of self-worth that would stand in dichotomy to his self-pity.
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. For further information see Rudolph Grey’s masterful biography Nightmare of Ecstasy. 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. The exhibition is curated by Michael Daley and Johan Kugelberg. An illustrated and annotated exhibition catalogue is available in a regular and deluxe edition. The deluxe edition of 250 numbered copies comes in a silk-screened slipcase with a 7-inch vinyl record of Chain Gang vocalist Ricky Luanda performing two homages to Ed Wood.