Tijuana bibles are a specific type of pornographic book popular in the first half of the 20th century. A subversive form of entertainment during The Great Depression, they relied on gross-out humor and sensationalism to sell. Made cheaply, with black-and-white covers that resembled children’s books, these crudely hand-drawn books sold for five cents a piece, thus the name.
The Tijuana Bible: The First Underground Sex Blog and the Last Dirty Book Brought to you by: Sam Lewis1. FROM THE ERECTION OF THE REPUBLIC. Tijuana Bibles are a genre of pornographic comic books sold from the 1930s to the early 1950s; the first were inspired by Superman comics and eventually became colorful, more narrative-driven works. All were anonymous and clandestine, considered lewd at the time of their production, which led to them being called “Tijuana bibles.” Talking about Tijuana size and Tijuana Bible value
Tijuana Bible Pdf
Tijuana bibles (also known as eight-pagers, Tillie-and-Mac books, Jiggs-and-Maggie books, jo-jo books, bluesies, blue-bibles, gray-backs, and two-by-fours)[1] were palm-sized pornographic comic books produced in the United States from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Their popularity peaked during the Great Depression era.
Most Tijuana bibles were obscene parodies of popular newspaper comic strips at the time, such as “Blondie”, “Barney Google”, “Moon Mullins”, “Popeye”, “Tillie the Toiler”, “The Katzenjammer Kids”, “Dick Tracy”, “Little Orphan Annie”, and “Bringing Up Father”. Others made use of characters based on popular movie and sports stars of the day such as Mae West, Clark Gable and Joe Louis, sometimes with names only subtly changed. Before World War II, almost all the stories were humorous, cartoon versions of well-known dirty jokes that had been making the rounds for decades.
The artists, writers, and publishers of these booklets generally remained anonymous as their publications was illegal and clandestine. The quality of the artwork varied widely. The subjects consisted of explicit sexual escapades, usually featuring well-known newspaper comic strip characters, movie stars, and (rarely) political figures, invariably used without respect for either copyright or libel law and without permission. Tijuana bibles featured ethnic stereotypes found in popular culture at the time, although one Tijuana bible (“You Nazi Man”) concluded on a serious note with a brief message from the publisher pleading for greater tolerance in Germany for the Jews.[2]
Tijuana Bible Value
While Tijuana Bibles are not considered to be fine art, there is a lot of money tied up in these little books. The original publisher, George W. Julian, was a millionaire who owned several newspapers and made a killing off of the sales of these books.
The value of a Tijuana Bible is dependent upon several factors including:
The size of the book – The larger ones are more valuable than smaller ones.
The condition – If the book is in good condition then it will have more value than one that has been damaged or torn over time.
The edition – Some editions are more rare than others and can fetch higher prices on auction sites such as eBay or Amazon.
Tijuana size
The Tijuana Bible is a form of pornographic comic popular in American culture between the 1920s and 1950s. The genre was named after the border town of Tijuana, Mexico, where they were often sold. They were called bibles because they had no covers and were designed to be read like real Bibles in public places. The name was coined by J. Edgar Hoover, who described them as “a publication consisting of obscene cartoons with a religious veneer.”
Tijuana Bibles are printed on newsprint paper, and most are very small (about 1½ inches high), using a heavily compressed format similar to that of vintage comic books; some have been known to measure only 5/8 inch wide by 1¼ inches tall (15 x 30mm). The artwork is crude in appearance and style; it frequently uses ethnic stereotypes for humor or shock value.
The first Tijuana Bible was produced by W.R. “Bob” Roberts in San Diego, California in 1922 with the title “Stories from Holy Writ Adapted for Modern Times (With Illustrations).” Although this bible was not illustrated, subsequent bibles included illustrations that were usually crudely drawn or cut out from other publications such as
The typical bible was an eight-panel comic strip in a wallet-sized 2.5 in × 4 in (64 mm × 102 mm) format with black print on cheap white paper and running eight pages in length.
Characters
Tillie and Mac are thought to have been the first Tijuana bible stars, along with Maggie and Jiggs from the popular newspaper strip Bringing Up Father. Tillie was soon followed by Winnie Winkle, Dumb Dora, Dixie Dugan, Fritzi Ritz, Ella Cinders, and other familiar comic strip characters stamped in the same mold. Making the most appearances in the bibles, Popeye and Blondie were the most popular characters in the 1930s. The first celebrity bibles were based on real-life newspaper tabloid sex scandals such as the Peaches and Daddy Browning case which made headlines in 1926. Ten years later, an entire series of bibles by one unknown artist obscenely lampooned Wallis Simpson and the King of England. By far the most popular celebrity character was Mae West, but virtually every major Hollywood star of the era was featured in the Tijuana bibles.
A popular comic strip character such as Tillie or Blondie might appear in as many as 40 eight-pagers drawn by ten artists. An entire series of ten bibles drawn by “Mr. Prolific” was based on famous gangsters; Legs Diamond, Al Capone, and Machine Gun Kelly were featured, while the artist working under the alias “Elmer Zilch” drew a set of eight comics about famous boxers such as Jack Dempsey. Another set of ten bibles drawn by Mr. Prolific featured radio stars, including Joe Penner and Kate Smith. Blackjack drew a set of ten comics using characters from Snow White, with each of the seven dwarfs starring in his own X-rated title.
The Rubber Salesman (c. 1935), drawn in the hand of “Elmer Zilch”, showing the “Ornate Border” design.
The ten-book series format was dictated by the limitations of the printing equipment used to print the bibles, which made it convenient to print a set of ten titles at a time, side by side on a large sheet which was then cut into strips, collated, folded, and stapled. Typically, a new set of ten would be issued every couple of months, all drawn by the same artist, featuring ten cartoon characters or celebrities. For several months in 1935, Elmer Zilch and his publishers experimented with a ten-page format, issued with two-tone covers in four sets of eight, plus one set of ten (the “Salesmen” series) in the eight-page format. Each panel in this series was surrounded by an intricate engraved arabesque border, possibly intended as an anti-counterfeiting device as it was hard to reproduce, and the series became known to collectors as the “Ornate Borders” series. Only 42 bibles are known by collectors to have been issued in this style, and most of them were soon being reprinted in truncated eight-page versions. Often the added two pages were simply filler gag panels drawn by Zilch.
In addition to comic strip characters and celebrities, many bibles featured nameless stock characters like cab drivers, firemen, traveling salesmen (and farmer’s daughters), icemen, maids, and the like. Very few original recurring characters were created expressly for the bibles; Mr. Prolific’s “Fuller Brush Man” was one, in which a door-to-door salesman named Ted starred in a series of ten episodic eight-page adventures. To many collectors, this series was the epitome of the Tijuana bible genre.
The first eight-page installment of The Adventures of a Fuller Brush Man, published circa 1936
During the Senate racket investigations of the 1950s, a New York businessman named Abe Rubin was asked if there was any truth to the rumor picked up by a Chicago police lieutenant that he had once been the original printer and distributor of “the Fuller Brush Man series of comics”. The Fuller Brush man stories made a very weak stab at continuity (e.g., “The following week I was sent to Tallahassee” or some such words at the commencement of each installment), but each eight-panel story was self-contained. The only real serial stories told in the eight-pager format were three tales by Blackjack, featuring original characters named Fifi, Maizie, and Tessie, in “To be continued” narratives which stretched through three or four installments each before concluding.
Tijuana bible examples
Most Tijuana bibles were obscene parodies of popular newspaper comic strips at the time, such as “Blondie”, “Barney Google”, “Moon Mullins”, “Popeye”, “Tillie the Toiler”, “The Katzenjammer Kids”, “Dick Tracy”, “Little Orphan Annie”, and “Bringing Up Father”.
Tijuana meaning
Located in Mexico, right next to the border to the US, it is the single most visited border city in the world. Also, it’s not as shitty as those cheap, stereotyping American films would have you believe (read: it’s not composed of a bunch of dodgy bars and whorehouses and a tiny police office).
Rather than have a long central vein and then nothing around it, as another poster described, it is a diverse, large city; and like every other city of its size, it has its good and bad neighbourhoods.
Sure there are parts of the city where crime is high as fuck and the conditions are practically unfit for human life, but hey, Mexico is considered a third-world country for a reason. Besides, there are also the “nicer” neighbourhoods, which pretty much look like a first-world suburb (and no, it’s not just the narcos that live there).
I’m not surprised the other posters are entirely unfamiliar with that last part of the city, as they probably only visit or know of the first one; which is, sadly, the one that draws the tourists in.