FFB: TABOO and TABOO 2, edited by Paul Neimark (New Classics House 1964, 1965)

For fairly obvious reasons, there has been an interplay between First Amendment advocacy, bohemian writers, sexually explicit fiction and other publications, and the occasional publication of fairly serious work by houses that are better known for what was intentionally disposable literature, at best. Usually, whether we refer to such magazines as Evergreen Review or Playboy or Rogue or Eros, or to such publishers as Grove Press or Olympia Press, there was often some desire to package and present sophisticated material in every sense, even if the sophistication of some of that material was solely in the adult themes addressed by it. Thus, the Chicago-based New Classics House, which published such work as Kerry Thornley's assassination account Oswald, Albert Ellis's collection of essays Suppressed, and, in two volumes published in 1964 and '65, Paul Neimark's anthologies Taboo and Taboo 2. Not quite Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), nor DV's first form, the abortive Judith Merril anthology for Regency Books that Ellison had commissioned during his brief editorship at that paperback line (which was a corporate cousin to the more erotic Greenleaf Classics and other imprints), the Taboo volumes nonetheless managed to publish some work by notable writers, some of which remains otherwise unavailable...I'm not sure, but it's possible one or more of the stories in Taboo, at least, had been written with the Merril project in mind. (See Matthew Davis's comments, below.)

(and this, from Richard Geis's Science Fiction Review, November/December 1978:

"9-7-78 The speculation/charge that Harlan Ellison may have "stolen" the idea of DANGEROUS VISIONS from a pocketbook series titled TABOO from the early Sixties [in Scott Edelman's letter in SFR #27] has been refuted and demolished by information not-to-be-doubted received today.

"Briefly, Harlan originated the TABOO anthology idea in 1960 or so, tried to sell it to Regency, and then turned to project over to Paul Niemark in 1961. Several stories had been submitted and two of the authors went along with the change in editorship. Volume One of TABOO was published in 1964.

"It would be nice if nasty speculations and junped conclusions could be avoided in the future." 

The issue can be read here [Archive.org] and here [Fanac.org].)

Taboo, for all the hype inherent in the subtitle "seven short stories that no publisher would touch from seven leading writers", reprints two of its stories from books published by mainline publishers, Charles Beaumont's "The Neighbors" (first in his 1960 Bantam Books collection Night Ride and Other Journeys) and Ray Russell's "Take a Deep Breath" (originally in a 1956 issue of George Fox's Chicago-based Playboy imitator Tiger, probably there as a salvage market since Russell was already an editor at Playboy by that time, but perhaps Hefner or A. C. Spectorsky didn't much care for the story; Russell apparently revised it for inclusion in his 1961 Ballantine collection Sardonicus and Other Stories and here). I believe all the other stories were first published in this volume (index courtesy ISFDB) of 127pp.:

• 9 • Second Coming • short story by Robert Bloch
• 17 • The Neighbors • (1960) • short story by Charles Beaumont
• 31 • The Daddy of Them All • novelette by Nelson Algren
• 61 • Battle Without Banners • short story by Harlan Ellison
• 81 • Take a Deep Breath • (1956) • short story by Ray Russell
• 93 • Lie Still, Snow White • short story by Fritz Leiber
• 115 • The Lovers • short story by Paul Neimark [typo'd as by Paul Niemark]

As far as I've found so far, the Bloch and Neimark stories have not been reprinted anywhere, nor the Algren at least under that title (though at least one study suggests that it's a rather different, more sardonic recasting of an incident in Algren's novel A Walk on the Wild Side). As the links above will demonstrate, the other stories original to the volume have since been reprinted in at least one collection of the authors' works. Neimark was a fairly prolific writer, perhaps best-known in his time as the as-told-to collaborator with Jesse Owens on several memoirs and related books by the Olympic athlete, and the author of the novel She Lives! (1972), which was adapted as one of the more popular US telefilms of the early 1970s. It's notable that all the writers involved had some strong ties to Chicago, and most had at least occasionally published in the men's magazines based in the city. Leiber's story includes an incident of incestuous necrophilia, so the tagline was perhaps not so very misleading as to the nature of the stories, if not the facts of their publication history. 

Taboo 2 has a less stellar, if still good, lineup of writers, and, presumably as a result, is far easier to procure on the secondhand book market; the second volume includes four stories, one each by James T. Farrell, true crime writer Jay Nash, fellow prolific novelist Con Sellers (who, like Neimark, would make his biggest commercial splash in later years, with his novels set in and dealing with the run up to World War 2), and Neimark himself again--from the Miscellaneous Anthologies Index:

Taboo 2 ed. Anon. (New Classics House 7N760, 1965, 75¢, 91pp, pb)
• 7 · The Day They Cancelled Christmas · James T. Farrell · nt
• 33 · The Conversion · Paul G. Neimark · nt
• 45 · Two Triumphs · Jay Nash · nt
• 68 · Like the Best Wine · Con Sellers · nt

At least this one is held in local libraries nearby for me (interlibrary loan from mostly Chicagoland holdings for the first volume might be problematic, at best). Niemark published at least one other, nonfiction anthology with New Classics, 1964's Crisis, which includes essays from Farrell and Algren mixed with considerations of the state of the world from L. Sprague de Camp, G. Harry Stine and L. G. Alexander, along with some verse from Carl Sandburg. 

Given the importance of the contributors and the relative interest both the content and the writers in question might generate, I'm mildly surprised these two anthologies haven't been scanned and posted in such online resources as Open Library, but at least the physical copies are held by some libraries, and the books, like most published in any quantity, are available, if, again, it's far more likely one can buy a copy of 2 than the original. I would like to know what was so taboo about the Bloch story, and why it's not been included in any of his collections over the decades. 

For more first-hand accounts of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.