Long Live The King - of Smut !

Harold Robbins was a joy to your mother and father, or maybe even to your grandmother and -father, because he brought dirty books out of the closet and onto their nightstands in the late 1940s and throughout the 50s and 60s. He styled himself as a Jewish orphan raised in a Catholic boys’ home, when in fact he was a nice Jewish boy, ne Harold Rubin, raised by his pharmacist father and stepmother in Brooklyn. It is true that he was a supreme hedonist, a skirt chaser and catcher, a coke head, and a gambler. It’s even true that he gambled with Aristotle Onassis. But, what can you expect from an individual who sold over 750 million books ? And liked the finer things of life ?  Although it’s been said that he - like so many others - squandered his talent by writing what he did, the orgies at his mansions in Beverly Hills, Acapulco, and France, added to his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame must have been a small compensation for the criticism.


Some of Robbins’ books were made into movies: “King Creole” started life as A Stone For Danny Fisher, and wound up as a movie with The (Other) King; Howard Hughes turned into George Peppard in “The Carpetbaggers”; and the lonely lady herself - Pia Zadora - starred in what else but “The Lonely Lady.”  Although not heavily collected, Robbins’ first few books command quite a nice price. All prices are for hardbound 1st editions, a fine condition book in  a fine condition dust jacket:

    - Never love a stranger   Knopf, 1948  1st Edition. His first book.   $ 850.00  
                                          Signed by Robbins: $ 2000.00
    This one was the basis for the 1958 film, starring Steve McQueen and
    John Drew Barrymore.


    - The Dream merchants   Knopf, 1949  1st Edition. His second book. $ 85.00  
                                          Signed  $125.00


    - A Stone For Danny Fisher  1951  Knopf, 1951 1st edition. $150.00 - $225.00

One can only wonder what Laurell K. Hamilton or Anne Rice’s vampire smut will sell for fifty years from
now ! Or, as Robbins said in  Stiletto (1960) :

        “She's got a good clean figure,” the produced said.
        “Not enough tits for me,“ the pratfall kid chortled. “I'm a T-man, myself.”