The Pimp's Bible: The Sweet Science of Sin

Alfred "Bilbo" Gholson's account of the Chicago South Side underworld, published in Chicago and catalogued by libraries as autobiography.

The Pimp's Bible: The Sweet Science of Sin is a paperback by Alfred "Bilbo" Gholson, published in Chicago by Research Associates School Times Publications and distributed by Frontline Distribution International. The edition Amazon lists is dated January 30, 2001, at 216 pages (ISBN 9780948390791). Open Library calls that the second edition and records an earlier printing, dated 1997, under ISBN 0948390220. Goodreads gives 1999.

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The publisher's description sells the book as the inside story of the South Side of Chicago, an underworld of money, sex and drugs, told by a man who says he lived it for fifty years before giving its secrets away. The library copy held by the Internet Archive is catalogued under biography and autobiography, criminology, pimps, prostitution and organized crime.

The title makes the book's claim: that the life has a scripture. It came out three decades after Iceberg Slim's Pimp: The Story of My Life, from the same city Beck worked in, around the time the Hughes brothers' American Pimp took the persona into theaters. It sits on this shelf between the memoirs and the later books that turned the life into rules, Pimpology and The PIMP Playbook.

Outside the book, almost nothing about Gholson is published. This archive has found no press coverage of his life, and it does not repeat the book's claims about him as fact.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Written by Alfred "Bilbo" Gholson

BORN
Research Associates School Times Publications, Chicago; distributed by Frontline Distribution International

ERA
Earlier printing c. 1997; second edition 2001

ASSOCIATED WITH
Alfred "Bilbo" Gholson; Chicago's South Side; Iceberg Slim; Pimpology; The PIMP Playbook

STANDING
Partly documented