Tijuana Bible - History

History

The term "Tijuana bibles" refers to the apocryphal belief that they were manufactured and smuggled across the border from Tijuana, Mexico. Many early bibles bore phony imprints of non-existent companies like "Tobasco Publishing Co." in Havana, London, or Paris; these imprints are universally regarded as false. The bibles were sold under the counter for a dollar or 50 cents in places where men congregated: barrooms, bowling alleys, garages, tobacco shops, barber shops and burlesque houses. One commentator reminisces:

"I came of age during the war and served in the United States Navy, and I recall seeing them behind the counter at magazine stands and bus terminals, in penny arcades, and in dusty little second-hand bookshops. During their last years of production, the late 1950s and early 1960s, the little second-hand book and curio shops seem to have been their primary distribution outlets."

In some senses, Tijuana bibles were the first underground comix. They featured original material at a time when legitimate American comic books were still reprinting material from newspaper strips. After World War II, both the quality and the popularity of the Tijuana bible declined.

Renowned comic artist and advocate of the medium of comics Art Spiegelman notes that records of prosecutions against publishers and artists for making Tijuana bibles do not seem to exist; the cartoonist added, however, that on occasion authorities seized shipments and people selling Tijuana bibles. According to Spiegelman, it's not clear whether mom and pop outfits or organized crime created the small salacious booklets. Old newspaper crime stories seem to indicate that most bibles were the product of a fairly small group of independent small businessmen with their own printing presses, invariably springing up again in a new location after a police raid shut them down. These businessmen manufactured a variety of pornographic products (including pornographic playing cards, gag greeting cards, and film reels) and created their own underground distribution routes around the United States. In the early days of Tijuana bibles they could be shipped in bulk around the country through commercial express offices. When access to commercial trucking was cut off in the mid-1930s the manufacturers began driving the products themselves to various points around the country, taking advantage of a loophole making it not a federal crime (at that time) to take pornography across state lines in a private vehicle. Clandestine distribution centers were located in a chain of large cities on an east-west axis from New York City to Kansas City, avoiding the South and New England which were regarded as dangerous places to be arrested for pornography. Business was always done on a strictly cash basis, with generous discounts for bulk purchases to the local distributors who then resold them to retail vendors. The local distributors were not members of organized crime syndicates but seedy small businessmen in an illegal black market business. A distributor's "territory" might be a large city or an entire state.

The total number of Tijuana bibles printed and sold in the heyday of the bibles in the 1930s was in the millions. But the number of new Tijuana bibles being produced took a nosedive at the beginning of World War II, and the industry never recovered. Police raids and the retirement of Doc Rankin, who was called up by the military at the beginning of the war, along with wartime shortages of paper and printing supplies, may have been factors in the decline of the Tijuana bibles at this time. Printing plates of older bibles were worn down through continued reprintings until they were nearly blank, and original plates lost in police raids had to be replaced with new plates crudely recut by hamfisted, untrained amateur engravers. The quality of Tijuana bibles available on the market suffered, and prices dropped as sales plummeted.

When the business was revived after the war the quality of new bibles was dismal. Both poorly drawn and badly printed, they were amateurish and puerile compared to the work of a decade before. Mr. Dyslexic, the leading artist of the postwar era, was possessed of an almost staggering lack of drawing talent matched only by his bad taste and ignorance of the English language. His best-known work, "Traveling Preacher", is a lengthy, labored-over retelling of a novel by Erskine Caldwell (Journeyman), whom Mr. Dyslexic then proceeded to repay by making Caldwell himself the subject of another scabrous Tijuana bible ("Erskine Caldwell in Grandpa's Revenge").