E. Hoffmann Price

There are dread secrets that none may know and have peace. More, secrets that render whosoever knoweth them an alien unto the tribe he belongs to, that cause him to walk alone on earth, for he who takes, pays.

The unknown characters of writing seem to be endowed with an evil of life of their own as though sentient, and fain would wrest themselves forth from the parchment and wreak mischief on whomsoever gazes upon them.

You took them home in a plain brown wrapper. You really didn’t want your mother, children, or respectable wife to find you reading them. The ladies in such stories lost their clothes with surprising frequency. Covers and story situations involved lots of bondage, torture, and violence, much of it a tease. Close analysis of the texts will reveal what parts of the female anatomy had to be described in each story with prescribed euphemisms and what parts could not be described at all. The illustrations, even in a medium noted for luridness, are astonishingly explicit, pushing the boundaries of what could be sent through the mails or displayed in public to the absolute limit at the time—and indeed these magazines were often sold under the counter.