Still, in keeping with tradition, we've decided to present our own take on the summer reading list. Screw the Times book review: we're going to take you down the primrose path where any hope of quality, or even sense, is left by the wayside. Sometimes, my water-brothers, a book is so bad that you have to either laugh at it, or else base a religion around it. Quite by accident, I happened across one magazine devoted to bad literature, Book Happy, while doing research for this article. Believe it or not, there are actually people devoted to collecting and reading these Plan Nines From Outer Spaces of the publishing world.

Yet, there would seem to be one untapped mother lode of poor writing, a great artery of bad taste leading directly into the darkness that is at the heart of America. Like an archaeologist sifting through layer after layer of prehistoric crap on the floor of some cave to find out what people ate in the Paleolithic, dutiful attention paid to this debris will no doubt give great insight into the psyche of our great land. I speak, of course, of the great world of vanity publishing.

Before we embark on our journey of discovery, a brief explanation of what a vanity press actually is would be in order. Before the World Wide Web enabled any idiot to broadcast their thoughts through the ether, the last hope of the great aspiring unwashed was what is euphemistically termed a "subsidy publisher." The principle is pay-to-play: Instead of the publishing house assuming the financial risk of producing a book, the burden is shifted onto the author, who forks over approximately the price of a car to see their words edited, printed, and bound into a completed product. Marketing, publicity, and distribution are, for the most part, in the hands of the author, though some vanity houses contribute a little to this process.

Vanity publishing is more widespread than you might think. One hundred and fifty years ago, it was pretty much par for the course for a well-off gentleman to pay for his own book's production. Several more recent well-known writers, such as Margaret Mitchell and Pat Conroy, have actually used subsidy publishers to get their careers off the ground. The downside is, of course, that, unlike publishers who survive by selling quality books to the public, there is a little to no editorial review process to weed out the books that have little audience, are poorly written, or the works of raving lunatics. Perhaps the subsidy press syndrome is why Conroy has been able to publish the same damn book about his dysfunctional Southern family about eighty times under various titles.

My first job in publishing, I'm sorry to say, was working for the nation's oldest and most established subsidy press. "Working" is perhaps not the right word. "Allowing myself to be tortured for a minimal salary" would be a better description. Our workspace, which hadn't been refurbished since approximately 1948, was an intellectual Dickensian sweatshop. Chained to a desk eight hours a day, with every motion, including lunch breaks, precisely monitored by a malodorous supervisor, I was buried under an avalanche of the worst manuscripts every conceived by the subhuman mind. It felt like a literary Mystery Science Theater 3000. The office was the beach where every rejected, half-assed, semi-literate manuscript in this great country of ours finally washed up to rot in the sun. I could actually feel the insanity leaping off the pages and into my brain.

Most of the books-and I use the term loosely-that crossed my desk dealt with one of several major themes. The most common genre was the memoir written by some old lady from Duluth spending her children's inheritance to publish her recollections of the Depression. Most of these, while not scintillating reading, tended to be fairly lucid, though there were also some that seemed to be catalogues of every wrong ever suffered over 80 years of so-called life. As a history buff, the ones I found most fascinating were memoirs of World War II or other historical events. Of course, though most veterans had the heroic task of typing up requisitions for blankets and jeep parts, and that people who have actually been in combat don't usually like to talk about it, every so often I'd happen across a first-hand account of the landing at Guadalcanal or battles against the Nazis in central Italy.

The second great category was attempts at novel-writing, ranging from the bad to the friggin' awful. The most common genres, to no one's surprise, were romance, mystery, and sci-fi. Most read like an attempt to write a screenplay for a very bad movie. Some were no worse than the usual Danielle Steele claptrap. The sci-fi were the worst, usually written by oversized fanboys whose understanding of the universe had been gleaned from Heinlein novels. These were often unintentionally hysterical.

Then, of course, there was the utter insanity, in which aliens, Jesus, or both invariably played a big role. There were spiritual tracts, sometimes written entirely in capital letters. There were author's biographies that described how to cover your kitchen in aluminum foil so that the CIA's mind-control satellites couldn't monitor your thoughts. For some reason I shall never understand, mental illness tends to involve either extraterrestrials or religion. Yet, for some reason I can never discern, the publishing house would never reject these poor souls' manuscripts so long as they could be re-typed into a word processor and typeset in Quark.

The following are actual quotes from books I've edited. To protect the guilty, authors and titles have been omitted. However, they should give you a good taste of what I had to endure:

From an infamous born-again Christian biker novel:

The nurse's face turned beet red. She aimed a vicious finger at Ally and shouted, "You heathen whore! I visit our leaders to help them share with God's chosen. You sleep with filthy heathen Eskimos!"

Later on, the heathen whore, a doctor, explained her humanitarian reasons for shtupping the Inuit:

"If I fornicated with a hundred Eskimos so I could doctor their wives and babies, I'm probably holding back on the estimate."

From a book about aliens landing unobserved in an American city for the purposes of world conquest and co-opting unwitting characters into their breeding program. Like many of the books, it displays a third-grade understanding of sex:

"Big Doc waited for his wife to bring up the subject of acquiring a uterus for her."

"She stared at what was an artificial vulva where before had been her navel and burst into tears."

From an attempt at a horror novel, two characters, Elie and Don, are lost on a back road. They decide to ask directions from some locals:

" 'I'm sure one of them would know if this so-called dirt road runs into 243,' Elie suggested.
'I'm not sure if that's a good idea,' Don remarked. 'They're all wearing the same kind of coveralls.' Elie looked at him as if he was the crazy one.
'What in the hell does that have to do with anything?' "

" 'There is some kind of evil in our tank farm. Where it came from or why, I couldn't tell you. Kevin was attacked by hungry skull heads.' "

"He shut his eyes, just to find them still there when he opened them back up."

In this (actually hilarious) comedy, we find out about the secret history of la isla encantada in an argument between a Puerto Ricana named Consuelita and a cowboy named Tennesse

" '. . . the Puerto Rican armada ruled the seas and most of the civilized world as it was known at that time. My God, man, don't you read books?'
'I've heard of the Spanish armada,' said Tennessee, 'but—'
'That's another story. They had one, too, but they were defeated and subsequently destroyed by storms. The Puerto Rican armada have never been defeated. They were invincibles and conquered all of Europe and civilization as they know it at that time.'
'Why is it,' said Tennessee, 'that Puerto Rico is not a major power today?'
'Oh, that is because the Puerto Rican peoples start to take the religion to their heart, and they fell guilty about all the cruel deeds they have done, and so they decide to be nice guys and let the rest of the world do the bad things.' "

Later in the book, when Tennessee and Consuelita run into some trouble:

" 'Why don't you call in the Royal Puerto Rican Air Force for an air strike?' "

From the autobiography of a woman who was actually in Plan 9 From Outer Space, and then became a made-for-TV move producer:

"The studio sent us off on a brief jaunt to Utah to try to convince Donny Osmond to take the role. I doubted whether he had the acting skills to play a retarded young man."

[In defense of that passage, and my opinions of Donny Osmond aside, it takes a consummate actor to play a character with Down's syndrome. It just reads really funny. . .]

Then there's just the random weirdness:

"The girls smashed Buck's testicles, trying to flatten them. When they found out they were not getting any flatter, they gave up."

"His mother became very hot and Toddy actually forced her to go to bed."

"Yes, Steve never saw Ward Cleaver holding the Beav down while June peed all over his face. He would have remembered that episode."

By now, you're probably asking why we would advocate anyone reading this stuff. Well, there are several reasons:

Firstly, because there are real gems in the drek.

Secondly, even though some of those books may have been hell to edit, sometimes they're so bad, they're hysterically funny. In other words, they're worth the purchase price for kitsch value alone. Plus, you'll have a really witty topic of conversation if anyone asks you, "So, read any good books lately?"

However, there's a third reason to read vanity press books: This is the real alternative press. Not subject to any editorial control, the writers simply poured their hearts out on the page, mailed their checks, and saw their words in print.

And, I've found, if someone wants to say something that badly, it's usually worthwhile to listen to them.