Epic Books (Art Enterprises)

Epic Books (Art Enterprises)

1961 - 1962

Los Angeles, CA

Epic Books specialized in sleaze publishing. That is, they sold sex books at a time when pornography was illegal and needed to be implied rather than described graphically. Sleaze publishers were under much scrutiny by the Post Office and Police Services, so they often closed after a short time in business before resurfacing under a different name. David Zentner, Epic's owner, reissued many of its titles under the Moonlight Reader imprint with different cover art and the authors' names (actual or pseudonymous), removed possibly to avoid prosecution by lawmakers or to make the reprints appear to be a "pirated" edition and thus more desirable.

Kemp, Earl. Sin-A-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties, edited by Brittany A. Daley, Hedi El Khoti, Earl Kemp, Miriam Linna, and Adam Parfrey, Feral House, Los Angeles, CA, 2005.

Denyse Rodrigues