Paperback 1146: Sexbound / Dean McCoy (Beacon B460F)

Paperback 1146: Beacon B460F (PBO, 1961)

Title: Sexbound

Author: Dean McCoy

Cover artist: Uncredited [Clement Micarelli]

Condition: 6.5/10

Value: $12-15

[Autumn Leaves, Ithaca NY, Aug. 2025]

Best things about this cover: 

• This novel combines two things I love: motels and frankness.
• Not just "frank"—"WHOLLY FRANK." No partial frankness here, nosiree. You get the whole frank and nothing but the frank. 
• Sexbound! It's a play on "snowbound." Get it? Like when you're trapped in a motel because of the sex storm outside. Only it's a sex storm inside, and your extremely lifelike partner has her head awkwardly propped up by a giant pillow while she chews her nails, sexily. That kind of "sexbound."
• If you ignore her hands, and her head, and the fact that she looks like she fell into this position from a great height, this is great girl art (GGA).
• A sleazy book in a sleazy condition. Very well read. Solid, with a tight spine, but with lots of edge wear and mild creasing. Some grime. This book looks like I imagine this motel feels. Like, is it sexy, or is it just ... dirty?
• "Grappling with the problems of infidelity created by America's roadside inns"—I love when sleaze poses as a public service message. "You'll definitely want to read this in order to stay informed about one of the great social ills of our day and definitely not because it will mildly arouse you while you are unsexbound in your sad and lonely motel room."

Best things about this back cover: 

• Some take the low road, and some take ... the blow road ('cause of the snow! the snow, I mean! Look at it blowing there in that ridiculously small sketch)
• "Excuse me, I'm lost. Could you tell me how to get to Lydia Lane?"
• "No, not Barbara!," I imagine someone exclaiming as they read this. Someone who knows Barbara from, like, PTA meetings.
• "It remained for the lush waitress, Vinnie, to pick up the pieces." Surely one of the great pieces of back cover copy. Poetic in its ridiculousness, or vice versa.
• Again with the FRANKness, and again with the public service announcement: "Read this book so that you may learn (in detail!) the perils of fucking strangers in roadside inns!"

Page 123~

When he had poured whiskey into glasses, he said, "Here's to the mating of my Porsche with your T-bird."

There's euphemism, and then there's whatever this is. "So you're gonna put your car in my ... car? I think you've had enough whiskey, big boy."

~RP

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