The Odd Kind by Arthur Adlon (All Editions)

The Odd Kind by Arthur Adlon is a lesbian pulp novel set in the world of high-fashion modelling, first published in 1961. The story centres on La Modena, a model who has reinvented herself from humble origins, and Pam Elliott, another model drawn between desire for a woman and the material rewards a wealthy man can offer. The book was published by Beacon in the early 1960s and later reprinted by Softcover Library in 1971.

Genre: Pulp

Subjects: Lesbians – Fiction; Lesbian sleaze

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Comments

The Odd Kind is a solid example of the Beacon Books lesbian pulp formula of the early 1960s: a glamorous setting, women whose desires for each other are tangled up with money and social ambition, and a male character hovering at the edges whose function is partly to raise the question the back cover makes explicit — do these women want him, or each other? The fashion world backdrop was a recurring milieu in pulp of this era, offering a readymade environment of beautiful women, wealth, and moral looseness that publishers found commercially reliable.

The two Beacon editions (B492F from 1962 and B795X from 1964) feature different cover artists — Milo on the first, Ernest Chiriaka (credited as Darcy) on the second — making them of some interest to pulp cover art collectors. Chiriaka was a prolific paperback cover illustrator whose work appeared across multiple publishers during this period. The 1971 Softcover Library reprint extended the book’s commercial life a decade after its original appearance, which was not unusual for titles that had sold steadily in their original format.

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Publication History