Word: ginzburgs
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...SEND ME TO PRISON cried the full-page ad in the New York Times, but that last desperate appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court appeared to be in vain. Ralph Ginzburg, huckster-publisher of diverse periodicals (including the defunct Eros, Avant-Garde, Fact and the current Moneysworth) is due to enter federal prison this week...
...sense, Ginzburg was a man ahead of the legal times. Eros, his slick, expensively produced "quarterly on the joys of love," was mildly startling in the early '60s, as was its companion biweekly "newsletter of love," Liaison, and a mail-order volume called The Housewife's Handbook on Selective Promiscuity. The most controversial display in Eros, for example, was a series of color pictures of a black man and a white woman embracing in the nude. The post office, after receiving 35,000 complaints, charged Ginzburg with violating an 1872 law prohibiting the mailing of obscene material...
...Still, Ginzburg hoped that the Supreme Court would let him off. In a series of cases the court had held censorship invalid under the First Amendment's guarantee of free expression. The key idea: material is not obscene unless by contemporary standards it "appealed to prurient interest" and was "utterly without redeeming social value." His publications had such value, said Ginzburg...
...minors under 17 years of age material defined to be obscene to them whether or not it would be obscene to adults." The court's reasoning was that "the well-being of its children is a subject within the state's constitutional power to regulate." And Ginzburg v. United States makes it possible to prosecute publishers for "pandering to the widespread weakness for titillation by pornography," even if the obscenity of the material being pandered is in doubt...
...RALPH GINZBURG...