Skip Williamson’s New Books

Skip Williamson

The model on the July cover of Playboy magazine will be 25-year old Crystal Harris.  Harris is now infamous as the former fiancé of Playboy publisher and decadent icon Hugh Hefner.  Hefner and Harris were due to be married in July 2011.  However Crystal Harris broke off the engagement in June 2011 for reasons that remain unclear.

According to friends, Hefner was heartbroken over the loss of his ‘soul mate.’  So, with Crystal Harris due to be on the July 2011 cover, Hugh Hefner has decided to overlay a sticker reading ‘Runaway Bride’ over her upper thighs.  Although the Internet is decimating the newspaper, magazine and publishing businesses in general and the print porn industry in general, Hefner is creating a surefire hard copy collectors issue for all the laptop wankers in the world.

The other thing Hugh Hefner has managed to do is once again bring worldwide interest, gossip, and chat board traffic to his once proud and now crumbling empire.  An empire that used to demand the attention of boys, men and speculators in all walks of life.

Zola System contributor and underground comics legend Skip Williamson didn’t have to glean his views of the Playboy Empire from the outside he was inside the corporate offices a participant in the action.   Skip has written a memoir of that time, now available at Amazon.com for purchase on the Kindle format.

(From the Product Description)

One man’s wild roller-coaster ride, a personal story about working in the men’s magazine publishing business from the late 1960s through the ’80s. In on the founding of Hustler magazine in a vacated Chicago whorehouse, through the event of one of his publishers being shot dead by the Chicago Police in a hostage situation — an event that led him up the Magnificent Mile to a decade-long staff position in the art department of Playboy magazine. These are stories of drug-fueled parties, Chicago Outfit henchmen — hit men, corrupt cops, pimps and prostitutes and meeting deadlines. Arriving at Playboy he joins a magazine on the cusp between the unchecked indulgences of the early years at the Big Bunny to more ridged corporate structure as the magazine’s assets and circulation crumbled away. There he found himself in the company of not so much an art department as a contingent of wild-eyed dipsomaniacal Merchant Marines. Illustrating “Steal this Book” for Abbie Hoffman, smoking dope with mythic porn star, Harry Reems, at Hef’s Playboy mansion, office sex, a disastrous week-long assignment with Deborah Harry and the band Blondie in Texas, adventures in the narco-sexual punk rock underbelly in New York City during the mid seventies, a deep friendship with Shel Silverstein and much more. This is the real story, unglossed, from the inside out.

Just when I’m halfway through Flesh, Skip sent me a note announcing his second book Spontaneous Combustion to be published in the next two weeks.

In his e-mail Skip told me “Spontaneous Combustion is my memoir about comics and why I was compelled to create them.  It’s also about the birth and death of the underground comix movement and much more.  It’s 125 pages of prose and 150 pages of art.”

In using the e-book format Williamson, a pioneer of new media, is once again on the cutting edge.  For those of you who don’t’ have the Kindle format (I don’t), no worries.  Amazon.com offers a free app to download for the Mac, PC and iPhone formats.

Spontaneous Combustion will be another important document from one of the main movers and shakers in two of the important movements in the late 20^th Century underground that became multi-million dollar industries.  Flesh and Spontaneous Combustion are books I consider to be a must reads.  So go and find out what one of the last of his kind has to say about a time when world media was beginning to change and the shit storm of political correctness was nowhere near the horizon.