Paul T. Rogers (1936 - September 12, 1984)

Even now, 25 years after I first read it, Saul’s Book retains a certain terrible majesty. I remember buying a copy at a bookstore in Provincetown sometime in the early '80s — though whether on my first rapturous visit to that Sirens‘ Cove or my second (and last) disastrous one the following summer I can‘t properly recall. So much of the past is a painful blur. But I still have that original copy — a foxed and dog-eared Penguin paperback (the hardcover original had been published in 1982 by Pushcart Press) on whose lurid cover a young man, cigarette dangling from his mouth, looks wistfully toward a marquee advertising LIVE GAY BURLESK BOLD RASCALS XX MALE MOVIES XX. “A Times Square Hustler‘s Passionate Love Story” proclaims the book‘s own tawdry marquee. I think I bought Saul’s Book because the cover also claimed, in what seemed a forlorn stab at legitimacy, that the novel had won the first annual Editors‘ Book Award (whatever happened to that award, I wonder?). The brief biographical note described the first-time author as “a schoolteacher and a social worker,” and assured (reassured?) the curious (skeptical?) reader that “he knows firsthand the people and places found in his book.” –Paul Russell, The Lost Library