Judging a bookstore by its brown paper cover

There is a 24-hour adult book store near my apartment. Hard to believe these places still exist. Between free Internet porn and online booksellers hocking paperbacks for 99 cents, I would have thought the adult book store would have gone the way of, well, every other kind of bookstore. I never would have guessed there were enough smut purists out there to allow adult book stores to afford Manhattan rents.

I have never popped into an adult book shop, but I would like to know if they have sections for Staff Recommendations. Hopefully not. It would be awkward enough browsing in an establishment called “Johnny’s Peepers Pages of Perversion,” without also discovering that the cashier’s vices involve butterscotch and squirrels.

I can just imagine the Staff Recommendation section…next to Who Moved My Lube? and The 17 Inch Sex Diet, there would be the stupid hand-written sign below the books:

“I really believed she was barely legal!” – Sam, Johnny Peeper’s Pages of Perversion Associate.

And even if I was intrigued enough by one of Sam’s recommendations to take a look at it, I’d still be afraid to buy the thing. There isn’t enough Purell in the world to get me to put my hands on a book that Sam the Shady Adult Bookstore Graveyard Shift Cashier might have already, ahem…flipped through.