Collector of lesbian pulp fiction paperbacks
The local alt-weekly profiles Austinite Ryan Richardson, who owns the world's largest collection of lesbian-oriented pulp fiction paperbacks.
"There's definitely a titillating aspect to it," says the 29-year-old. But what really grabs him is the cover art. The literature itself follows a paint-by-numbers script, although there have been some genuine artistic accomplishments to emerge from the kitsch, most notably Women's Barracks, by Tereska Torres. For the most part, though, as Richardson says, "the books themselves can't live up to the covers. I'm in it for the covers, plain and simple." His pursuit is thus a kind of strange inversion of reading Playboy just for the articles.
Richardson displays nearly 200 scanned covers at his site Strange Sisters, which may well be the coolest site on the Internet.
