WhenVoluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin first appeared in the fall of 2000, it inspired wide acclaim and multiple printings.

This sourcebook of hundreds of rare visual delights from the pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period "Babylon on the Spree" has the distinction of being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture, inspiring performers, filmmakers, historians straight and gay, designers, and musicians like the Dresden Dolls and Marilyn Manson. It is the visual scrapbook and inspired design source of hit television series, Berlin Babylon.

Voluptuous Panic's expanded edition includes the new illustrated chapter "Sex Magic and the Occult," documenting German pagan cults and their bizarre erotic rituals, including instructions for entering into the "Sexual Fourth Dimension."

Mel Gordon (1947–2018) was called a “drama scholar of the fringe” by the New York Times, published books on the grisly Grand Guignol theater, the deviant sexual worlds of Weimar Berlin and Paris, and Hitler's Jewish clairvoyant.