SEXIS WRONG

The Sex Lit You
Probably Haven’t Read
Obscure and Expunged Material Dealing
With Everyone’s Favorite Activity
Russ Kick
The Forgotten Sex Books of
Charles Atlas
Charles Atlas has been transforming skinny runts, scarecrows,
and bags of bones into muscle-bound he-men since
1924. “Hey! Quit Kicking sand in our faces!” shrieks weakling
Joe (later rechristened “Mac”) in one of the most famous
ads of all time. After bulking up thanks to the Atlas program,
he bitchslaps “that big bully.” But becoming ripped wasn’t
the only change Joe’s body was undergoing. He was becoming
a “real man” in more ways than one, and Atlas wanted to
teach him about that, too.
He was becoming a “real man” in
more ways than one, and Atlas
wanted to teach him about that, too.
Thus it came to pass that in 1928 Charles Atlas published a
series of ten books about sex. These odd publications—at
4x7 inches and 150 pages each, they are at the border between
book and booklet—have been utterly forgotten. They
are mentioned only in passing online, and the official Charles
Atlas website doesn’t acknowledge them at all (yep, the company
is still around, even though the only things Atlas himself
is pushing up are daises). I accidentally stumbled across
these long-lost treasures when I searched the Advanced
Book Exchange (the world’s best used-books site) for sex-related
books published before 1940. Running my bleary eyes
across hundreds of titles and descriptions, up popped a complete
boxed set of these beauties, decking me almost as hard
as the newly buff Joe. What could Atlas possibly have told
young men about sex in the 1920s?
Actually, Atlas didn’t write these books; he didn’t even pretend
to via a ghostwriter. He published them under the imprint
“Roman Publishing Company”—evidently a nod to his
homeland of Italy—with a notice that the copyright had been
assigned to Charles Atlas, Ltd. The books were penned by
Dr. David H. Keller, a psychiatrist who was then the assistant
superintendent at a sanitarium in Bumfuck, Egypt (technically,
Bolivar, Tennessee, with a current population of 5,800).
Around the time these books came out, Keller was breaking
into the world of pulp science fiction and supernatural tales.
Hugo Gernsback would later praise him highly. If only Keller
had stuck to writing stories and novels like “The Thing in the
Cellar” and The Human Termites, a lot of boys might’ve been
spared the guilt and psychic trauma of reading his largely sexnegative,
crypto-Christian eugenics tirades.
The series kicks off with Sex and Family Through the Ages,
in which Keller begins at the beginning, citing the appearance
of one-celled organisms (“whether we believe it came
from another planet or that it was created by a Divine Hand
makes little difference as far as the fact of its
existence is concerned”). Surprisingly, Keller
believes in evolution and traces the history of
sexual reproduction through groups of cells to
sea life to cave people to the good, white, married
Christian couples of 1928. Along the way, he gives us
the money quote, the passage that informs the entire series
of books:
The young people of the past chose their mates
by a process of natural selection, just as the lions
and humming-birds do today. Back of sexual
desire, behind the thought of conquest and being
conquered was the constant one of founding a
home around a fireside and in that home there
were to be children. In fact a home and marriage
without children was intolerable and not to be
260 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG