collect vintage pornography. Sure Sotheby’s about to auction off the rare Sodom, or The Gentleman Instructed (attributed to the Earl of Rochester who supposedly wrote a considerable amount of porn) and it’s expected to bring big bucks to the table, but there’s plenty of vintage porn available to the attentive collector. For example, look at this ebay goodie. It’s something of a how-to book, but typical of its day, it’s a how to lead a righteous life tract, but its fore-edge is trangressively marred with an explicit fuck illustration.
Now that’s my kind of religion. Yum.
And look at what the book went for — $470.00 dollars! A tad too expensive for my starving artist budget, but as a book collector, I’m aware that when you bid on that kind of book, you’re competing more with collectors of tomes featuring decorated fore-edges than you are porn collectors. The best I can do on my budget is save the jpg of the illustration on my hard drive.
However, I am able to snag a book here and there to my liking. Recently, I got a later edition of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon. It’s a 1950s edition from The Odalisque Society, went for an affordable asking price and still had its dustjacket — which is rather uncommon. Until people started to seriously collect modern firsts, dustjackets were considered disposable; they served primarily to protect the binding before purchase, and most book buyers routinely discarded them upon receipt of the book. So it was nice to see it, especially since it’s a rather nicely designed and printed dustjacket for its time.
When I leafed through the book, I found another item folded within its pages — a two-page mimeographed porn tale. Whoa! A porn freebie! And such a good one, reflective of its time. A fair amount of porn in the 1950s was composed on typewriters, mimeographed, then discretely distributed through the mail. The tales were rarely long, probably because the seller wanted it to pass through the mail looking as much like a standard letter as possible. Why? Because sending pornography through the postal service was completely illegal. It could land you in jail, big time. Well, maybe not as bigtime as a murder conviction or armed robbery, but it was crime enough that smut peddlers were called bookleggers.
Bear in mind that these two pages* that I can give to you legally now were considered pornographic enough then to make me a lawbreaker. Remember that the next time a censorship issue comes up, won’t you?
Sidebar: I noticed Salon’s interview with Jonathan Margolis, author of O: An Intimate History of the Orgasm. Funny, but the same day his book arrived by UPS, Amatory arrived by USPS — and it’s guilty of some of the orgasm myths Margolis talks about, namely copious amounts of semen and women’s orgasmic response to being flooded by it. But the book more often featured, thanks to lack of birth control in its day, coitus interruptus and what we now call money shots in its pages. Sodomy, however, in its broadest definition allowed its horndog protagonist to spill the goods at will.
(The stuff I indulge in on a rainy day, huh?)
*Give ‘em time if you don’t have broadband. They’re half-meg files.
