There's a song they used to sing at Antioch College, and it went something like this: "She was just a little freshman Victim of Admission's whim Then she met an upperclassman—we won't name him— And she had a child by him. "Now he's off in New York City Rescued by the co-op plan While she walks the streets of Yellow Springs, Ohio, Looking for another man." Ah, they don't write 'em like that anymore, and it's not hard to see why. And the sad story recounted in the song is not entirely unlike that of Linda Shepard, titular (so to speak) heroine of CAMPUS TRAMP. The story of the book may be more interesting than the story told in the book. I wrote it in July of 1959, at the Hotel Rio on West 47th Street in New York. I'd just arrived from, yes, Yellow Springs, having spent a year writing books for Harry Shorten, editing the college newspaper, and giving short shrift to my academic studies. (This was my third year at Antioch. I was there for two years, took a year off to work at a literary agency, and then came back, only to discover that, having seen Paree, you couldn't keep me down on the farm. I tried to drop out during the first semester, got manipulated into staying by my parents, and somehow finished the year. Now I was in New York, where I was to spend the summer writing, before returning for what was supposed to be my last year of school.) Well. My agent came up with an assignment. William Hamling, publisher of science fiction and Rogue Magazine, had decided to initiate a line of erotic novels similar to what I'd been writing for Midwood. Could I write one? I could and did, and thought it might be amusing to use Antioch as a setting, and to choose the characters' surnames from the buildings and dormitory units on the Antioch campus. I picked the title CAMPUS TRAMP and sent it off, and they liked it well enough in Hamlingville (that would be Evanston, Illinois, IIRC) to ask for more. Not long after I'd finished the book, I got a letter from Yellow Springs. The Student Personnel Committee, having taken a long look at my academic performance, advised me of their decision that I might be happier elsewhere. I thought this was very perceptive of them, that I would indeed be happier almost anywhere else, and the passive-aggressive lout I was at the time found this an ideal resolution to a situation I seemed incapable of resolving on my own. Their letter had left the door slightly ajar, if not wide open; I sensed I could talk my way back in, but why? Then CAMPUS TRAMP came out, and a copy or two made it all the way to Yellow Springs, and a legend sprang up. I'd written the book as payback, it was said, a way to revenge myself upon the school that had expelled me. Now when I'd written CAMPUS TRAMP I'd still thought I was to return in the fall. And I was if anything profoundly grateful to the school for having cut the umbilical cord and sent me out into the world. No end of people knew better, even as they were sure they knew who the models were for the various characters—but that happens all the time. But never mind. One recalls the newspaperman's line from THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend!" For years I wondered who painted the cover, and recently learned it was one Harold W. McCauley. If he himself wasn't familiar with the college, he must have had coaching; that's a remarkably accurate representation of Antioch's Main Building, towers and all. Copies of the book commanded high prices at Antioch Senior Sales over the years, I've been assured, and Christian Feuerstein used to perform inspired readings of the text at what I can but assume were memorable occasions. I just wish someone had thought to hire her to do the audiobook.

Sheldon Lord began his career with CARLA (#5 in the Collection of Classic Erotica),published by Harry Shorten's Midwood Books in 1958. Just about a year later he wrote CAMPUS TRAMP (CCL #7) for William Hamling's Nightstand Books, for whom he'd morphed into Andrew Shaw. And young Mr. Lord's first book for yet a third publisher, Beacon, was APRIL NORTH (CCL #4). Each publisher wanted more from the guy. Beacon's request was remarkably specific. They had a title in mind—COMMUNITY OF WOMEN—and a theme. Their notion was that no end of interesting and attractive couples lived in the suburbs, and five mornings a week virtually all of the husbands rode into Manhattan on the train, while their wives remained to do presumably wifely things at home. So during daytime hours, Monday through Friday, all of these wives constituted a…Community of Women. Which would make it a hotbed of, um, hot stuff. Well, it was an okay premise. I remember the occasion when it was delivered to me. I was in Buffalo, my ancestral home, on a brief visit. My agent called and recounted what Beacon had asked for. (That agent believed in keeping writers and publishers far apart. I did meet Harry Shorten once, at Harry's insistence, but never had any direct contact with anyone at Nightstand or Beacon.) "They need this as soon as possible," he added. I fell for this, of course. I always did. About a year earlier the same agent told me that Monarch Books had an unfinished novel, the first chapters and outline of which had been written by William Ard, who'd died at what even then seemed like an impossibly young age. So my job was to complete the book, which would put a few dollars in my pocket and a few more in the near-empty purse of Ard's widow. "And they need it right away…" Well, the hell they did. But I bought the notion, moved into a hotel on the corner of Broadway and 69th. I went there every morning and went home every night, and i finished that awful book. Are might have made something of it, he was a pretty good writer, but all I can say for myself is the book got written, and published. And it's not as though Monarch was holding the press for it. They published it whenever they got around to it. Same with Beacon and COMMUNITY OF WOMEN. Nobody there was holding his breath. But I believed what I was told, so I wrote it right there, sitting at a card table in the front room of my mother's house on Starin Avenue. I didn't know much about life in the suburbs, or about people who went to an office every morning and came home every night, but it wasn't hard to come up with characters and find ways for them to interact with one another. If I recall correctly (and how often does that happen?) it took me four or five days. I guess Beacon liked it well enough. They wanted more, and published several more of Sheldon Lord's efforts. And then, when they wanted still more and I had neither time nor inclination to write them, my agent suggested we find writers to ghost the books under Sheldon Lord's name; I'd receive a fee off the top for my involvement, with the balance to go to the actual writers. Consequently there are more than a few Sheldon Lord titles—specifically most of the ones for Beacon—which I neither wrote nor read. And so I've spared you a summary of COMMUNITY OF WOMEN, and gotten off the hook instead by taking this little trip down Memory Lane. It is, after all, one of my favorite thoroughfares, not without potholes and sharp turns, and sometimes confused with the Boulevard of Broken Dreams… This ebook edition of COMMUNITY OF WOMEN includes as a bonus the opening chapter of the next volume in the Collection of Classic Erotica, BORN TO BE BAD.

TRAMP was first published in 1961 by Nightstand Books, under the pen name of Andrew Shaw. Here's a taste of the text: "IT WAS PRECISELY ten o'clock when the alarm went off. The clock, purchased years ago at a drugstore for not much money, made up in volume what it lacked in melody. It did not ring, exactly; it jangled. Schoenberg would have been delighted with the twelve-tone discordance of the clock."For perhaps ten seconds the clock rang without eliciting any response whatsoever. Then, dreamily, a hand worked its way out from under the bedcovers. The hand pawed its way through warm and musty air until it located the rickety night-table at the side of the bed. The clock was somewhere on top of the night-table, and the hand searched painstakingly until the clock was found. Fingers wound themselves around the clock like tentacles. One finger, more industrious than the rest, succeeded in discovering the little button that would shut off the alarm. The button was pressed and the room was plunged once again into silence. The hand withdrew, found its way once more beneath the blankets, and all was as it had been before the atonality of the alarm."There was, however, a slight difference. The owner of the hand was awake now. Although she tried rather desperately to return to the soft protectiveness of sleep, sleep was not to be hers. The clock had ruined it. The room, which had seemed so silent while she slept, was now filled with noise. Somewhere in the distance a fire engine or ambulance was careening away with its siren wide open. The traffic was heavy around the corner on Broadway, thick with mid-morning trucks. A woman shrieked across the courtyard in Spanish."The girl sighed. Slowly and reluctantly she pushed back the bedcovers. Her eyes opened one at a time and she blinked unhappily at the light. Sunlight peeped in at her through the hole in the window shade. She peeped back at it, thought sadly how nice it would be to go back to sleep, then sighed again and clambered forth out of the bed. She was nude, and her bare skin felt slightly clammy from sleep."She wrapped herself in a bathrobe, slipped her feet into deerskin slippers, unbolted her door and walked down the hall to the bathroom which she shared with the other four occupants of the third floor at 253 West 94th Street. She switched on the light, closed and bolted the bathroom door, and removed her bathrobe and slippers, setting them down on the footstool along with the towel she had brought with her. She turned on the shower and waited nervously until the water was as close to the proper temperature as it ever got. Then she stepped into the shower and scrubbed herself diligently."he worked the soap all over her body. She washed her face-high cheekbones, full mouth with sensuous lips, large eyes and a straight, almost Roman nose. She washed her shoulders, massaged the soap into her high, firm, large breasts, washed belly and thighs and legs. She spent a long time in the shower because she found it quite impossible to start a day unless she was as clean as a shower could make her. Finally she washed her rich nut-brown hair, rinsed it thoroughly, soaped and rinsed twice more. Then she stepped out of the tub and began to dry herself with the towel."And here's author Lawrence Block's take on TRAMP: "I can't say I remember much about TRAMP, but then I've reached an age when it's hard to remember what I had for dinner last night. The book, like most of my pseudonymous work, was written at a time recently examined in A Writer Prepares, a memoir of my beginnings as a writer, to be released on June 24, 2021. I hope you may find A Writer Prepares of interest; in the meantime, perhaps TRAMP will brighten a couple of hours

I'd no sooner finished CARLA, my first book for Midwood Tower, than Harry Shorten asked for another. I'd just returned to Antioch College, where after two years as an undistinguished student I'd dropped out for a year to hang on to a summer job at Scott Meredith's literary agency and bucket shop. It was wonderful training, but after a year there I decided I should go back to school, where I had a chance to assume the editorship of the school newspaper. So there I was in Yellow Springs, Ohio, taking a batch of English courses, and I had a publisher who wanted me to write a book. What'll it be, Larry—a paper on Tobias Smollett and the Great Chain of Being, or 50,000 words of soul-searching and sex for Harry Shorten? 50,000 words for which I'd be paid $600? No contest, really. The story concern a has-been writer trying to get back in the game, and all these years later I find it interesting that this young wannabe was already picturing himself on the way down and out. A fellow named Craig said some nice things in his review, so I'll excerpt it here: "The protagonist Dan Larkin is an aspiring author, like Block himself, and it's downright eerie how many aspects of Dan's fictional life would end up paralleling the arc of Block's own life over the next 25 years: the progression from obscure pulp writer to eventual best-seller stardom, the women, the binge drinking, and the eventual spiral into alcoholism. . . "There are flashes of some really good writing. The narrator's voice resembles shades of Matt Scudde at times. There is a very funny chapter detailing a ten-day drinking binge that presages passages in After the First Death and When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes. There's a memorable scene of frank and unexpected violence during an encounter with an older woman. Above all, the author's young-eyed enthusiasm for the publishing industry and the life of being a professional writer shines through despite an affected veneer of world-weariness." My guess is that some of the writing stuff is interesting. Interesting, too, is the title—which was not my idea, in case you were wondering. I have no idea what title I hung on it, but Harry or one of his elves went for A STRANGE KIND OF LOVE. Meanwhile, my very first novel, a sensitive lesbian coming-of-age effort which I'd called SHADOWS, was in the process of being accepted over at Fawcett Books for their Crest imprint. (They were the first publisher to see it, and in fact had it in hand before I wrote the opening sentence of CARLA, but Harry could commission two books and publish them both in less time than Fawcett could read a manuscript and reach a decision.) And when they did say yes to it, and when I'd revised it to their satisfaction, they changed my pen name (from Rhoda Moore to Lesley Evans, for reasons no one ever explained) and my title from SHADOWS to STRANGE ARE THE WAYS OF LOVE. A STRANGE KIND OF LOVE and STRANGE ARE THE WAYS OF LOVE? Really? I don't think I've ever used the word "strange" in a title since, and doubt I ever shall. Unless, of course, I were to write a politically incorrect novel of a young gay man's coming out, but I don't think so. Besides, STRANGE FRUIT only works if you can get Billie Holiday to sing it. The cover is by Rudy Nappi (1923-2015), who was for 20 years the principal cover artist for the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries. The rumor that his cover for A STRANGE KIND OF LOVE was adapted from a rejected Nancy Drew cover strikes me, I have to say, as fanciful. But what do I know? This ebook of A STRANGE KIND OF LOVE includes as a bonus the opening chapter of Book #7 in the Collection of Classic Erotica, CAMPUS TRAMP.

Meet Linda Shepard. She's sick to death with being wholesome. Linda thinks she knows what would cure her ills. She's looking for a man. A capable man. Her first man. The campus of Clifton College is the perfect hunting grounds. It's swelling with men and brimming with liquor, and it doesn't take Linda long to find her prize. Don Gibbs is the editor of the Clifton Record. He's brusque, he's unkempt, and he somehow maintains his broad physique with a strict diet of booze, coffee and cigarettes. Soon enough his piercing intellect and hedonistic ways bring Linda to her knees and lower, lower still. Is she in over her head? As Linda soon discovers, sex can be a dangerous game... Almost as dangerous as love. Lawrence Block is the bestselling author of over fifty novels, including the much-heralded Matthew Scudder crime series. As a young man in New York, Block wrote pornographic paperbacks for outfits such as Nightstand Books to publish under their own house pseudonyms. In this case, Campus Tramp was released as the work of Andrew Shaw; examined retrospectively, however, it has Block written all over it. The year is 1960 and the setting is Clifton College, a thinly disguised analog for the real-life Antioch College, Block's own Alma Mater, just outside Yellow Springs, Ohio. Campus Tramp is loaded with references to Antioch's landmarks, personages, history and... reputation. Whether read as a time capsule from the eve of the sexual revolution traversing taboo topics like homosexuality and abortion, or just as a retro sex romp by a masterful writer at the dawn of his career, Campus Tramp, like its titular protagonist Linda Shepard, has something to offer everybody.

Sheldon Lord began his career with CARLA (#5 in the Collection of Classic Erotica), published by Harry Shorten's Midwood Books in 1958. Just about a year later he wrote CAMPUS TRAMP (CCL #7) for William Hamling's Nightstand Books, for whom he'd morphed into Andrew Shaw. And young Mr. Lord's first book for yet a third publisher, Beacon, was APRIL NORTH (CCL #4). Each publisher wanted more from the guy. Beacon's request for a second book was remarkably specific. They had a title in mind-COMMUNITY OF WOMEN-and a theme. Their notion was that no end of interesting and attractive couples lived in the suburbs, and five mornings a week virtually all of the husbands rode into Manhattan on the train, while their wives remained to do presumably wifely things at home. So during daytime hours, Monday through Friday, all of these wives constituted a...Community of Women. Which would make it a hotbed of, um, hot stuff. Duh. Well, it was an okay premise. I remember the occasion when it was delivered to me. I was in Buffalo, my ancestral home, on a brief visit. My agent called and recounted what Beacon had asked for. (That agent believed in keeping writers and publishers far apart. I did meet Harry Shorten once, at Harry's insistence, but never had any direct contact with anyone at Nightstand or Beacon.) "They need this as soon as possible," he added. I fell for this, of course. I always did. About a year earlier I was living on West 69th Street when the same agent told me that Monarch Books had an unfinished novel, the first chapters and outline of which had been written by William Ard, who'd died at what even then seemed like an impossibly young age. (Looking back, I can't avoid the thought that the one thing poor Bill Ard got out of his early death was that he didn't have to finish that goddam book.) So my job was to complete the book, which would put a few dollars in my pocket and a few more in the near-empty purse of Ard's widow. "And they need it right away..." Well, the hell they did. But I bought the notion, moved into a hotel on the corner of Broadway and 69th. I went there every morning and went home every night, and i finished that awful book. Are might have made something of it, he was a pretty good writer, but all I can say for myself is the book got written, and published. And it's not as though Monarch was holding the press for it. They published it whenever they got around to it. Same with Beacon and COMMUNITY OF WOMEN. Nobody there was holding his breath. But I believed what I was told, so I wrote it right there, sitting at a card table in the front room of my mother's house on Starin Avenue. I didn't know much about life in the suburbs, or about people who went to an office every morning and came home every night, but it wasn't hard to come up with characters and find ways for them to interact with one another. If I recall correctly (and how often does that happen?) it took me four or five days. I guess Beacon liked it well enough. They wanted more, and published several more of Sheldon Lord's efforts. And then, when they wanted still more and I had neither time nor inclination to write them, my agent suggested we find writers to ghost the books under Sheldon Lord's name; I'd receive a fee off the top for my involvement, with the balance to go to the actual writers. Consequently there are more than a few Sheldon Lord titles-specifically most of the ones for Beacon-which I neither wrote nor read. And so I've spared you a summary of COMMUNITY OF WOMEN, and gotten off the hook instead by taking this little trip down Memory Lane. It is, after all, one of my favorite thoroughfares, not without potholes and sharp turns, and sometimes confused with the Boulevard of Broken Dreams...

Meet Linda Shepard.She's sick to death with being wholesome.Linda thinks she knows what would cure her ills. She's looking for a man. A capable man. Her first man.The campus of Clifton College is the perfect hunting grounds. It's swelling with men and brimming with liquor, and it doesn't take Linda long to find her prize.Don Gibbs is the editor of the Clifton Record. He's brusque, he's unkempt, and he somehow maintains his broad physique with a strict diet of booze, coffee and cigarettes. Soon enough his piercing intellect and hedonistic ways bring Linda to her knees and lower, lower still.Is she in over her head? As Linda soon discovers, sex can be a dangerous game... Almost as dangerous as love.Lawrence Block is the bestselling author of over fifty novels, including the much-heralded Matthew Scudder crime series. As a young man in New York, Block wrote pornographic paperbacks for outfits such as Nightstand Books to publish under their own house pseudonyms. In this case, Campus Tramp was released as the work of Andrew Shaw; examined retrospectively, however, it has Block written all over it.The year is 1960 and the setting is Clifton College, a thinly disguised analog for the real-life Antioch College, Block's own Alma Mater, just outside Yellow Springs, Ohio. Campus Tramp is loaded with references to Antioch's landmarks, personages, history and... reputation.Whether read as a time capsule from the eve of the sexual revolution traversing taboo topics like homosexuality and abortion, or just as a retro sex romp by a masterful writer at the dawn of his career, Campus Tramp, like its titular protagonist Linda Shepard, has something to offer everybody.