Plain Brown Wrapper Book Review: Hypnotism Revealed

 

I picked this one to review next because it appeared in a classic 1971 hypno porn film called She Did What He Wanted. I freeze framed it and found the book! In this film a young man reads this book and through some experimentation discovers he can nonconsensually hypnotize several young women to fuck him. Everyone, honestly including the guy, is kind of charming and hot in an unselfconscious 70s way.

 

 

Why did they pick this book? Maybe because it's the ubiquitous trash mail order hypnosis book. Its history is not a history of a hypnotist, but rather of a salesman. As you can read on the webpage of the Wilshire Book Company, he's a mail order entrepreneur, who started at the age of 16 advertising in the back of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics (that name again), first selling how to play chess books published by other people.

His first venture into publishing was a book called Hypnotism Revealed, which he wrote himself. "There's no money in having someone else publish your book," Powers explains. "I was a budding entrepreneur, so instead of getting a small percentage as a royalty from another publisher, I decided I might as well publish the book and sell it myself."

 

This makes me once again reflect on how hypnosis is real, but you'd never think so, based on how scam-adjacent it so often is. He wrote this when he was 26 years old, and judging by the contents, this book is mostly either plagiarized or pulled out of his ass. It's a large type 113 pages, with several chapters towards the end consisting literally of random press clippings about the usefulness of hypnosis, reproduced in full.

Powers sold it continuously through the mail new without changing a single word I'm sure, until at least 1977, almost 30 years, charging $1 almost the whole time.

I did not succeed in finding a full original ad for this book in Popular Mechanics, though I found this fragment with the same typeface:

 

And in the search discovered the oldest one yet, from 1913 - that's at least how long this grift has been running!

And the pitch is so familiar, with a clear lineage to the ads in backs of comics I read in the 80s. But I digress! What about the actual book?

Hypnotism Revealed (1949, but 1975 edition) - Melvin Powers

Tone: Stiffly authoritative, like an insecure substitute teacher working out of the textbook

Valuable for: 

• Some pretty fucking sexy 1940s high femme hypno modelling shots

• As you can see some pretty grabby convincers, including one that is hard to fake where you wave ammonia under their nose after telling them it's french perfume, and another where you stab them in the palm with a hypodermic needle.
  
  
  
  
• Not the worst basic eye fixation script ("the fascination method"), though I was amused that it later appears to suggest self-hypnosis via staring at a point on the ceiling while somehow also reading the script.
  
  
  
  
  
• Another reminder of just how old some and hacky some of our hack concepts are, e.g. the depth scale, "all hypnosis is self-hypnosis", a lot of patter such as "drifting and dreaming" (I'm still going to say that one, I'm the hack, it's me)
  
• Surprisingly decent advice for dealing with difficult cases ("refractory subjects") recommending that you "pattern in to the personality of the individual", focus on the pretalk, use fractionation, try rapid inductions, and try a kind of overload where they lie down and both a metronome and a hypnotic LP is played (only $5, send check or money order) On the other hand, uniquely among the books I've found, suggests "when all methods have failed" sodium pentothol injections! 
  

Douche-o-meter (1-5): 3

This thing is scammy and shoddy, but not as gross as the ones that seem to be about the author's ego. Besides the record, tries to sell you "the Powers hypnodisc spiral" ($1), "the Powers crystal ball" (50 cents), and a "sleep-o-matic" tape recorder that can replay the same snippet of self-suggestions at intervals all night. He encourages you to practice hypnotherapy after about 15 pages of large type insructions, everything from smoking, to alcoholism, to "menstrual irregularities", to speedrunning Freudian analysis. Despite where I heard about it and the photos, a minimal amount of sexism and implied predation, though like a lot of these midcentury books it's easy to imagine the beta-est male in the Mad Men office studying it intently.

Hypnotic language example: "Imagine that every beat of the metronome is saying, 'sleep'"

The bottom line: Spend that $1 on 10 lemon drops instead!

Though this should become a meme format: