My #horrorinthewild series on Twitter helps with the urge to buy everything. I began to focus on two things - only my favorite authors, and only books I actually wanted to read. Some of you may be grieved to know I sold off roughly 30 to 35 large boxes of paperbacks over a period of 5 years. This resulted in bookcases in every room of the house (not a bad thing, unless you were my wife or kids), but every bookcase was overflowing.
This quickly became unmanageable, not because of the Leisure titles alone, but because I bought every horror title I came across published in the 1980s and ’90s. About that time the Leisure cover art took a distinct turn toward the seriously awesome.Īs I became more of a serious collector, I started to buy every Leisure horror novel I came across, including books with the BMI imprint. Sometime between 19, Leisure became an imprint of the Dorchester.
At the time, Leisure was an imprint of Nordon Publications. The earliest Leisure horror novels I’ve come across so far are Golem by Barbara Anson (1978) and Black Fire by James Tarabilda (1980). I’d love to talk to someone who worked for the company back in the 1970s and hear the story. I tend to wonder if Leisure began as a porn publisher and then branched into more mainstream fiction. These were of a slightly different flavor - “true confession” erotica. The men’s adventure novels published by Leisure back then had advertisements in the end pages for other books. They were all westerns and action novels unfortunately, they all looked like they had been carried in said cowboy’s saddle bag through a rainstorm. An old cowboy had huge tables full of paperbacks. I discovered The Sharpshooter series at Canton Trade Days, a massive flea-market here in Texas. They had a men’s action series called The Sharpshooter written by Bruno Rossi. Image from a Mulholland Books article by Keith Breese. The Sharpshooter #3: Blood Bath by Bruno Rossi, published by Leisure Books. Some of the earliest books I have seen with the Leisure Books name were published in the mid-1970s. I once tried to dig a little deeper into the history of the publishing label.
And so it began, my ongoing hunt for Leisure Books. The first one I chose to read was Late At Night by William Schoell. One day she came back to the house with a paper bag full of paperbacks. My first recollection of reading a title published by Leisure was during an extended visit to my grandmother’s house as a teenager. One of the most popular articles on my personal website is an article called 1980s Pulp Horror: The Lurid Days of Leisure. In all my years of collecting horror paperbacks, I have always had a soft spot for Leisure Books.
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