Downstairs, in my library, sits a pile of magazines dating from the 1930s to the 1970s. I bought them in bulk sales, most often via ebay, fascinated by their existence. I’d discover they were produced by the father of science fiction, pulp publisher Hugo Gernsback, adding to my fascination. At one point, my curiosity spilled over into an article that discussed not only its aim and content, but how it reached people of a certain generation.

I’m talking about Sexology, the Illustrated Magazine of Sex Science and now Craig Yoe has selected and compiled a boatload of articles from its many issues, delightfully packaged in a retro-hardcover edition that I can’t help but feel would be the perfect gift to the horndog on your holiday list. Yoe introduces the collection with a “history of” recap that veers from near-camp to seriously informative, then launches you right into the most titillating offerings the magazine put forth in its forty-year existence. Topics like Homosexual Chickens, Men in Lingerie,and Sex Education on the Beach will keep you entertained and amazed. (My personal favorites? Chastising Thrills and Two Psychiatrists Analyze Obscene, Pornographic Letters.)

I won’t deny that Sexology had more than a bit of an “anatomical curiosity museum” element to its contents — a topic like Polymastia… multiple breasts isn’t all that different than pickled body parts — but the magazine also served a useful purpose. Immigrating to the U.S. in 1907, Gernsback was surprised to find a lack of sexual intelligence among Americans and began publishing the magazine during the sexual dark ages of the early 20th-century. It took courage to publish any tracts on sexuality, thanks to the suppressive affects of the Comstock Act and, indeed, Sexology would more than once come under the scrutiny of obscenity mavens, but it never faced actual conviction, perhaps because it contained enough medical language and M.D. appellations in its bylines to protect it from being labeled prurient.

Gernsback’s commitment to sexual intelligence would last a lifetime. If I understand this ERBzine “reprint” of a 1963 Life magazine article that profiled Gernsback, he was still fighting the enlightenment battle.

“Gernsback is fully prepared, even anxious, to answer the slavering critic who accuses him of prurience. Sex, he feels, is a “cultural subject” and as such should not be “relegated to back rooms” but discussed openly–even its more peripheral phases. He finds the “non-scientific attitude” about it “appalling, abysmal stupidity….Let me tell you something very few people realize,” he says. “Even physicians are not taught anything about sex in college! A horrifying situation!”

According to Life, Gernsback said he felt that “sex offer[ed] a last, unexplored, scientific frontier.”

Gernsback was right. But I wonder if he knew how prescient that statement was. Did he know that the homesteading race of sex was about to commence? That the pill catapulted us into the sexual revolution, overthrowing the old order of moral suppression?

Ironically, Gernsback died in 1967 during the summer of love. He did not live to see the rise of sexual liberation in all its variety but he escaped having to see his creation outlive its usefulness.

But I bet he would’ve appreciated the fact that his little magazine had a role in its own obsolescence.