As a vintage paperback enthusiast, I would have been sold on this no matter what. But the contents turned out to be truly educational.

The focus is primarily on hundreds of Western paperbacks, mostly written in England in response to the popularity of spaghetti Westerns. A group of writers known as the "Piccadilly Cowboys" cranked out several series under a fistful of pseudonymns and one of them, John Harvey, ends up later becoming well known and successful as a crime novelist.

The spaghetti Western changed the genre in ways that are equally mourned and celebrated, but identified the commercial potential in a new audience for an old standby. While the Western peaked in the mid-twentieth century as a powerful parable for liberal and democractic values, the late '60s and early '70s saw the European take on this American mythology reflecting an awareness of corruption, venality, cynicism and sex and violence.

All of that was already under the surface of great American westerns from the 1950s (and '40s and '60s to some extent), but the point of the movies were to remind audiences of the importance of due process and fair play, to demonstrate the importance of opposing bigotry and abuses of power.

By the late 1960s it would have to be obvious to many that the message wasn't getting through to the people in power. And so the stark brutality of the Euro western came to town.

To cash in on their success, these books followed their lead, spinning endless tales of vengeance and violence, with gore and kinky sex often swamping the pages. One book even transplants the action of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to an old west setting.

Weapons, tortures and slayings become more far out in the effort to draw in readers—or, more accurately, purchasers.