monster mush

“[…] there’s a growing demand for mythical creature porn in ebook format. Plots invariably center on women seduced by (or forced to have sex with) leprechauns, gargoyles, minotaurs, aliens, or any type of man-beast hybrid. The Week gave special mention to dinosaur erotica in its 'Unexpected Trends of 2013' list, calling it 'the strangest literary phenomenon of the year, and possibly ever.' But the publication underestimated just how niche this stuff gets. For example, a search for the Bigfoot series on Amazon yields related titles like Ravaged by the Hydra, Mounted by the Gryphon, Fertilized in Space, and—my personal favorite—Frankenstein’s Bitch.

From: Retrogasm

 But really, how strange is this so-called ‘literary phenomenon?’ Take Bram Stoker’s Dracula: through observing the Count’s gradual seduction of Lucy Westenra (and her resulting metamorphosis), we come to see that she desired him from the beginning. The lines are slightly blurrier in the original King Kong, but bold enough for critics to extrapolate a sexual subtext, so that an ape holding a blonde woman hostage atop the Empire State Building in Manhattan is an ape holding a blonde woman atop a giant phallus in Manhattan. The difference between the woman-falls-for-demon-beast storyline in fiction then and now is a matter of the implicit versus the explicit.”
 
— Lizzie Crocker, The Daily Beast
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"[…] make the thing look worse."

"[…David Pearson, on-time, Penguin in-house designer] was [...] responsible for the 2007 redesign of the Penguin Popular Classics series, the cheapo, no-introduction, no-scholarly notes edition originally brought out to counter the threat of Wordsworth Classics. The previous look had been full bleed artwork with a tan-coloured oval title box towards the top. They were, to be charitable, twee in the extreme. To be uncharitable, they were horrid.

     Penguin ran an internal competition to come up with a comprehensive overhaul of the series. Five designers submitted, and Pearson won with a super-plain, type-only design featuring modern Gill Sans lettering, a doubled up logo featuring two dancing penguins (to denote, perhaps rather obliquely, the ‘popular’ aspect) and the £2 price tag, prominently, even proudly, displayed. The cover was an equally restrained maroon."
— Jonathan Gibbs, The Independent
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From: Penny Dreadful Vintage

An early Penguin cover design. Note the price: "One shilling and sixpence," which by today's reckoning (since Decimal Day in 1971) would be 7 1/2p. 

Kept in the Dark

From: Fine Books & Collections

"Bram Stoker's private journal sat unnoticed on his great-grandson's bookshelf in England for at least a year.
     Full of notes that would inform his legendary novel Dracula and other stories, the thin, unmarked book had probably been lugged down from the attic at some point, along with other things the Stoker family had passed down for more than a century and placed inconspicuously in Noel Dobbs' Isle of Wight home.
     Then, one day not long ago, a researcher working on a project about Stoker got in touch with Dobbs to ask if he might know anything about a journal his famous relative kept. Dobbs looked around and finally popped open this tiny book. It was signed 'Abraham Stoker.' " — Ashley Fantz, CNN
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