Alta-Glamour

03/13/2026

Ivan

This year's Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention is rapidly approaching! It will be held March 27-29, 2026 at the Westin Lombard Yorktown Center in Lombard, Illinois. You can visit our website (www.windycitypulpandpaper) for more details.

As usual, our dealer room will have approximately 180 tables full of pulps, paperbacks, SF and mystery hardcovers, original illustration art, golden and silver age comics, original comic art, movie posters and more!

The last day to book a hotel room and get the group rate is 5:00 pm central on March 10! If you've not booked your room yet, please do so in the next few days. Note that if the block sells out sooner than March 10, then the con rate will no longer be available. The reservation link can be found at:

https://www.windycitypulpandpaper.com/home/?page_id=10

As usual, we will have estate auctions during the show on Friday and Saturday night. The items, with photos, are now on the website, and there is a way in which folks can place absentee bids (be sure to read the instructions carefully). Here's one of the pulps that will be in the Saturday night session.

01/16/2026

01/16/2026

12/21/2025

Happy holidays, Merry Xmas, and very good 2026! There’s hope!

11/26/2025

Ivan

For all those who were horrified that I wasn't wearing gloves when handling Wallace personal copy of the first edition of Origin of Species, please see this post from the British Library: https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/white-gloves-or-not-white-gloves

10/09/2025

Our new catalog is at the link below:
“In their own tongues: A selection of agitational publications targeting working-class immigrants.”
https://bolerium.cdn.bibliopolis.com/images/upload/immigrantlabor.pdf

08/10/2025

“Having resurfaced late in life due to a revival of her s*x films, an eighty-nine-year-old Doris Wishman, clad in leopard print and wedge sandals, appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 2002 … Born in 1912, a Jewish New Yorker and child of Ukrainian émigrés, Wishman was hardly ordinary. By the time of the Conan interview, which aired five months before her death, she had titillated and bewildered adult and cult film audiences for many decades with idiosyncratic movies rife with s*xual degradation, grotesque and preposterous bodily perfidy, and, as one of her advertisements blared, “Girls without Restraint!” Among the most prolific American women directors of the postwar period, her vastly eccentric body of work, counting thirty features, remains unknown to many film connoisseurs … Entirely self-taught, she came to moviemaking as a widow in middle age, producing her first film, the nudist escapade Hideout in the Sun, with $20,000 borrowed from her sister Pearl. Before long, she was the biggest producer of nudist camp pictures, releasing eight in the early ’60s before shifting into black-and-white s*x melodramas, or “roughies,” as the s*xploitation mode adjusted to darker, more violent subjects and a grittier aesthetic inflected by noir, art cinema, and variants of realism … The pleasures of watching Wishman’s b***y, crass, absurd, and kitschy skin flicks heighten across their proliferative form, as the gimmicks, stiletto heels, polyester curtains, ashtrays, vases, and black lace panties pile up from reel to reel.”

/ From “Who’s afraid of Doris Wishman?” by Elena Gorfinkel in Artforum, September 2022 /

In Memoriam: pioneering high empress of low-budget s*xploitation, s**t peddler, vintage sleaze icon and true naïve low-brow outsider artist Doris Wishman (1 June 1912 – 10 August 2002) died on this day. I treasure her films Blaze Starr Goes Nudist (1962), Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), The S*x Perils of Paulette (1965), Deadly Weapons (1973) and Double Agent 73 (1974). Pictured: leading lady Chesty Morgan in Wishman’s Double Agent 73.