Opium - Jean Cocteau

ICON BOOKS B1

NO DATE

LONDON, UK

FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY PETER OWEN LTD 1957

COVER DESIGN BY FISK

ABOUT THIS BOOK

In December 1928, Jean Cocteau entered a clinic near Paris hoping for a cure from opium addiction. He remained there some months and during this time wrote the main body of notes which form this book.

Cocteau himself describes OPIUM as the Diary of a Cure; but it is not a diary in the conventional sense for this is no mere record of day-to-day treatment, and it is  as different in style as it is in content from that other famous testimony of an opium eater by Thomas De Quincy.

Here then is an account-totally free from self-pity-by one of the greatest of living writers, of a deeply harrowing experience.

This first paperback edition of OPIUM includes many drawings that Cocteau made during his treatment which convey, even more graphically than the text. the splendours and miseries of drug addiction.

Blood In My Eye - George Jackson

PENGUIN BOOKS 01400.38787

MIDDLESEX, UK

FIRST PRINTING 1975

FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY JONATHAN CAPE 1972

COVER PHOTO BY PAUL POPPER LTD

George Jackson completed the manuscript of Blood in my Eye just a few days before he was shot and killed while, it is alleged, attempting to escape from the maximum-security prison at San Quentin. His story became known to millions with the publication of Soledad Brother.

Blood in my Eye takes up where Soledad Brother left off - it is a devastating and passionate critique of American society and a programme for destruction.

'Whether or not George Jackson's analysis proves prophetic, the power and despairing clarity of his writing makes him one of the great voices of the American Left.'

- Sunday Times

The Young Wolves - Hank Janson

COMPACT BOOKS F345

FIRST PRINTING 1968

LONDON, UK

the young wolves

They hunted as a pack, terrorizing the town with looting, fire-raising and rape...

A chance meeting with an old friend, whom he finds distraught and angry, puts Hank Janson on the trail of a gang of youths who appear to have been trained by some mysterious background character in all the ignoble arts of terror and extortion.

Joe Radinski had good cause to be angry; because he had refused to "co-operate" with the gang his 12-year old daughter had been brutally imprisoned and raped by these boys, for whom a conveniently arranged alibi had served to prevent any effective police action against them.

Gradually but remorselessly, Hank moves in on the gang's home ground, vowing to tear it apart, with his bare hands if necessary. When he starts showing results, the hidden power hits back in predictably ruthless fashion; but by this time Hank has the assistance of the very attractive and nimble-witted Cilla, with her own good reasons for hating the gang. She not only saves him from a very tricky situation, and helps him in his quest for the identity of his mystery quarry, but also manages to excel in the more intimate arts of which hank is something of an expert and connoisseur.

In Hot Blood - Mercer B. Cook

The grim story of a trio of young bloodthirsty hoodlums who swept across the country leaving a trail of robbery, mayhem and finally a brutal mass murder! As electrifying as today's headlines!

CHALLENGE BOOKS CB 201

FIRST PRINTING 1966

CALIFORNIA, USA

in hot blood

Will make your blood run cold as the gripping story of three young hoodlums, their contempt for society and the final senseless murders of six innocent people unfolds. But this is more than a story of chilling tragedy. It's an inside look at the hearts and minds of killers and victims alike, a raw slice of life itself!

Streets Of Sin - Mark Ryan

A powerful novel of wild delinquents on the prowl...delving into the fruits of forbidden desires and violent passions!

BEDSIDE BOOKS BB 813

INITIAL EDITION 1959

NEW YORK, USA

COVER ART BY LOU MARCHETTI

WILD DESIRES...

and untamed passions were the driving forces that made the Barons street gang the mob of delinquent sinners that they were. With no respect for morality, these shameless hoods and their gang-girl debs killed, raped and lusted for love. Their twisted lives in the gutter led them to further dangerous crimes and...

SINFUL AFFAIRS!

Play It Cool - Jack Gerstine

Wild Days and Nights of a Young Hoodlum...

DIGIT BOOKS R295

FIRST PRINTING - NO DATE

LONDON, UK

The teeming streets of Brooklyn were a battle-ground for fifteen-year-old Joey Vanne. A bright personable kid, he might have gone far once, but he was already marked down as a 'Juvenile Delinquent'.

You've read before about boys like Joey-good kids gone wrong. But never before has there been such a blazingly real story-one that is utterly true to life-about today's teen-agers on the prowl.

A Kind Of Loving - Stan Barstow

MICHAEL JOSEPH

FIRST PRINTING 1960

LONDON, UK

COVER ART BY ADRIAN BAILEY

Set against the background of a West Riding industrial town. A Kind of Loving is the story of a boy's physical infatuation with a girl whom he does not love. When, in his loneliness and romantic dream of the ideal mate, Victor Arthur Brown pursues Ingrid Rothwell he little realises the emotional crises in store for him nor how the events of the next two years will change his life; and in its examination of Vic's predicament the book takes on the wider significance of a study of some of the pitfalls which endanger youth as it fumbles its often uncharted way into adult life.

But this novel is no moral tract. The racy vernacular of the narrative is alive and vigorous and plunges the reader at the outset into the world of Vic's home, his working life, and his troubled relationship with Ingrid.

A Kind of Loving is a far cry from the civilised novel of manners, yet Victor Brown is no 'hero with a broken bottle.' He is to a great extent the prisoner of his own respectability - a respectability which, though it becomes strained to breaking point in the course of his relationship with Ingrid and her mother, the pseudo-refined and arrogant Mrs Rothwell, eventually combines with his innate decency and kindliness to determine him to seek an unselfish solution to his predicament. To do, as he puts it, 'what's right' and hope for 'a kind of loving' that will carry him through.