This is the front cover of a book about wrestling that I remember very well from my youth. The Pictorial History of Pro Wrestling is a 192 page masterpiece published in 1984. It contained mostly black-and-white photos (plus a few pages of color photos), along with written histories and descriptions of dozens of wrestlers active at the time.
In the mid 1980s, my local public library acquired a copy of this amazing book! Which I could check out (for free!) whenever I needed a wrestling fix (which I did at least 3 or 4 times, especially when my parents were going out of town for the weekend.) Or I could visit the library at any time, find my boner-generator (I knew precisely where they shelved it), and flip through the pages for a quick pick-me-up.
May the Lord bless and keep whatever anonymous librarian acquired this book and made it available to me! You see, in those days, we didn't have unlimited wrestle-porn at our fingertips, so to discover this gem, this free access to hundreds of spectacular wrestling images, made my teenage heart go pitter-patter!
Plus, this was a library book, so it's a scholarly publication -- not some smutty porno mag sitting on the same rack as Playboy. Therefore I could carry this book in my bookbag without seeming like too much of a pervert, because it's for learning. I could read it under the context of a researcher expanding my knowledge of sports history. (I just preferred to do my research in the privacy of my bedroom.)
Below is the back cover of the book depicting a violent scene -- a bloody-faced Dusty Rhodes blatantly strangling Billy Graham with a rope. It is a full color image, like 8.5" X 11" -- and it is glorious! Those huge arms on Graham, wowza! (But of course, it's the history between these covers that most interested me.)
Thanks to the magic of the internet, which enables our long-lost artifacts from childhood to be easily found, I recently bought a used copy of the Pictorial History of Wrestling on eBay. I see it's also available on Amazon for like $8 if you want your own copy.
Over the next few weeks, I will be reviewing and posting some of my favorite images from the book so you can perhaps understand why it got me so worked up.
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