THE
WOODFORD PRESS
In the late Forties, Allan Wilson and his partner,
Aaron Moses (“Moe”) Shapiro, were the editors of the Jack Woodford
Press; Citadel was their
distributor. A prolific writer of soft-core erotica with a deft
sense of plot construction and scene setting,
Woodford wrote of free spirited and well traveled young men, with jobs
and ambitions similar to the
heroes of popular films, who bedded adventurous and spirited women.
Both parties were raring to go
on page one.
A Jack Woodford Press title, 1950, in a typical dust
jacket.
Shapiro and Wilson’s books, many by Woodford himself and others by
Clement Wood,
his wife Gloria
Goddard, the glamorous Fan Nichols, Joe Weiss (a good writer in the
urban naturalist tradition who liked
to incorporate his spanking fetish into most of his works), sold
especially
well in drug stores and near army bases, as well as in general shops in
Times Square and
other cities. The titles alone--How
Rough Can it Get (Weiss),
Pawn (Nichols), Illicit, Here Is My Body, Savage Honeymoon (all by
Woodford)–were enough to get the reader “under cover,” and
Wilson and Shapiro issued dust jackets featuring busty women in dresses
with low
décolletage for
these inexpensive hardbacks. Moe was known as a hard-edged,
tough-minded man who knew the
compulsions of his customers and how to entice them to come back for
more.
Moe Shapiro's Waron Press 1961 reprint of George Riley Scott's
treatise, Into Whose Hands.
The British edition had a much less provocative dust jacket.
With his
partner Philip Lewis at P. Lewis and Company on East 23rd, he had run a
library of classic under
the counter titles for which wealthy patrons may have paid up to $100 a
rental, with much of that
rate being returned when the book itself was. He had several
publishing ventures, including Gargoyle
Sales. His Gargoyle books were available on Times Square, in porn
kingpin Eddie Mishkin’s shops.
First address of P. Lewis &Co., 128 E. 23rd, 1940.
Source: Tax Dept. Photograph, NYC Dept. of Records
and Information Services, Municipal Archives.
According to Wilson, every Christmas until his
retirement in 1950, the wily Shapiro sent John Sumner, erotica watchdog
for the New York Society for the
Suppression of Vice, a case of whiskey. Moe also sent Sumner the
Woodford Press titles to read, and
Sumner saw nothing wrong with them. But in 1957, police detectives
visited both P. Lewis and
Concord, as well as nine other Manhattan stores (and many more in
Brooklyn), impounding Woodford
titles, by then also published in paperback. Msgr. Joseph McCaffrey of
42nd Street’s Holy
Cross Church had suggested action be taken. He must have hoped that
without the Woodford
line, many of the “tourist book shops” one block east of his church
would have had
trouble staying afloat. By then, these included Louis Finkelstein’s
Time Square Book Bazaar, 225-27 W
42nd. The largest orders in New York for Jack Woodford Press titles
came from Finkelstein, whom
other booksellers regarded as a pioneer exploiter of the smut-hungry
reader when he
opened in 1940 as the first
Times Square location which focused on erotica, mostly the varied
girlie and nudist magazines of the era.
