Did you ever wonder how early pornographers advertised and distributed their wares? It is usually assumed that back in the days of routine obscenity prosecutions, the “hard stuff” was distributed by organized crime on a city-by-city basis and sold “under the counter” by your shadier sort of neighborhood news stand operators. That probably was a common method of distribution, too. But in the back pages of the December 1947 Sports Fiction magazine, I’m seeing evidence that the cheaply-printed 8-page raunch booklets known as Tijuana bibles were being advertised for sale through the mail. I’m quite certain that the “eight page bibles” are the product these coyly-cryptic ads describe, but I’m less certain if these were genuine offerings. Given the serious penalties for mailing obscene material in those days, it’s possible the ads are simple fraud: send money, get bupkis.

The deliberate vagueness of the advertisements further raises the possibility of more complex frauds. Order sea monkeys, get brine shrimp eggs. Order x-ray specs, get a cheap lens with a spine-shaped feather glued to it. Order what sounds like Tijuana bibles, get similar-looking pamphlets with no obscene material in them? I discount this as unlikely, only because the ads offer dozens of different titles. If an entire genre of non-pornographic 8-page-bible lookalikes had ever existed, where are surviving examples? The real ones were cheap and fragile, yet many survive. On balance, I think these advertisements are likely more-or-less legit.

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The so-called “Tijuana Bibles” that had their pornographic heyday in the 1930s mostly featured parody versions of comic strip characters from comic strips that are long forgotten today. Fortunately, the action in these dirty little books is timeless, featuring delightfully rude filth that we have no trouble recognizing. The character “Boots” in this one was a bit of a flapper in Boots and Her Buddies, the presumably staid and boring 1924 newspaper strip by Edgar Martin. When we meet Boots’s pornographic alter ego, she’s picking up a small town yokel and offering to show him a good time:

He’s totally game: “Hot darn it, let’s go!” I guess street corners outside the local train station were the fuck pal hookup hot spots of their day. Where else was a bored and horny flapper chick looking for a good time supposed to go?

Whatever he thought or hoped was going to happen once he got back to his new flapper friend’s place, her direct dialog and especially her hand down the front of his pants quickly dispels all ambiguity. But yokel or not, he’s still a little bit worried that the lady might have an “old gent” who could walk in and disapprove of their sport:

Our man doesn’t need to be told twice. But even while laying some creditable pipe, he’s not so much the yokel that he doesn’t wonder: why him, exactly?

Some things don’t change across most of 100 years, and the ability of the average male ego to swallow implausibly large lumps of flattery is one of those immutables. She calls him “Daddy” and “a great big handsome brute” and sure, of course, it all makes sense!

The thing about these 8-pagers is that they were pornographic comics. And the “country bumpkin” yokel used to be a highly comic figure among city folk. Much of the comedy in this short book is wondering when the yokel will finally realize that his friendly city-girl fuckbuddy has a mercenary motive, which every worldly person would have understood from the stereotypical offer of a “real good time” in the first panel. His impenetrable lack of comprehension does not even give way when she matter-of-factly calls him a john. Perhaps that’s not a word they use in Oshkosh?

Finally she gets around to the the straightforward ask. Sometimes with the slow ones you have to be direct. “How about fifty dollars?”

And the joke slides home! “Gosh, no! Don’t give me money!” Nobody could be this stupid… or could they?

I’m not sure whether the entire joke is about the stupid yokel who never understood that he was with a sex worker, or whether there’s a less pleasant undertone. Is there a layer where we are supposed to wonder if the “yokel” was playing dumb the whole time, to take advantage of Boots and her “payment after services” business model?

I found this antique porn pamphlet (one of the so-called “8-page bibles”, also sometimes known as “Tijuana bibles”) scanned in an old download directory of mine. The original scan (unaltered by me) is here; the covers and individual pages have been variously cropped, rotated, blown up, and lightly sharpened by me. Such work can be tedious but is somehow still fun; it’s also the sort of time-consuming work that my Patreon supporters make possible. Thank you!

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I found this Tijuana Bible comic panel floating around on my hard drive, thought you’d all enjoy it:

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This panel from one of the ancient “eight page bible / Tijuana Bible ” comics clearly hearkens back to the era when a lot of men considered cunnilingus to be both distasteful and unmanly. More fools they! Normally I shy away from publishing anything that reinforces that sort of outmoded stupidities, but I’m making an exception in this case because of the empowered woman in the panel, and because I quite fancy the bit of accompanying doggerel verse even if the sentiment is vile:

I flirted with the widow Glass —
by gosh, I lived to rue it!
She tried to make me kiss her as
her husband used to do it.

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Faustus recently called my attention to Erotic Comics: a Graphic History from Tijuana Bibles to Underground Comix. The many vintage erotic gems to be discovered therein include a well-hung Joe Stalin spreading sexual satisfaction among the proletariat:

Also not to be overlooked: buggery!

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Mexican porn comics? Who knew? Nobody tells us Norteamericanos the stuff we need to know. Until now:

Pocket-sized comic books called historietas have been available for decades on every corner newsstand, but in the past seven years they have been overrun by a fresh and lurid genre that’s part noir melodrama, part Tijuana bible–what Mexico City writer Alex Giardino dubs the “ghetto libretto.”

These nasty funnies are less graphic than their Japanese counterparts but make up in operatic depravity what they lack in plumbing. Page through Heat Between Her Legs, Secret Temptations, or Carnal Sins, at the Las Americas supermarket on East Lake Street, and you’ll find every variant of anguish on the characters’ faces. My favorite artist, who signs his name Galvez and inks boldly with crude strokes, tells sweaty tales of poor women who endure class browbeating, male predation, incest, and long nights of hot, guilty sex–all before hacking their tormentors to pieces.