Word: ginzburgs
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...That Eros was banned, and Ginzburg imprisoned, says less about the magazine and more about the times (and the Times). As everyone now agrees, the 60s really began with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Vietnam protests, the ghetto uprisings, and of course sex, drugs and rock 'n roll cracked open, like a raptor from its egg. For the first years of that decade, we were, essentially, still in the 50s, with Doris Day reigning on the big screen and Father Knows Best on the small...
...Like the foreign films of the time, which offered both snob appeal (subtitles and chess games with Death) and sex appeal (the occasional exposed bosom), Eros hoped to be a status symbol for the would-be liberated. Ginzburg, just 31 when he launched his dream book, would be Hefner with a higher IQ and a permanent pass to the New York Public Library's back room of naughty classical literature...
...problem. Hefner, in his robe, pipe and ascot, a blond on each arm and around each leg, really looked like a playboy. Ginzburg, unfortunately, was Central Casting's idea of a pornographer: shady, you might say shifty, with a thin, sallow face and a small mustache. But he, unlike Hefner, wasn't selling himself as the face of his magazine. And Eros was so gorgeous, it made the sex appeal of its editor-publisher irrelevant...
...they get the name and address of a 17-year-old in Philadelphia? Typically, publishers buy subscription lists from other magazines, but I didn't subscribe to any. The truth is, I wasn't that special, since, in the months before Eros started publishing, Ginzburg had sent out 3 million brochures as bait. I was just one of the ones that...
...went for Eros not so much because I was a horny kid (though I was) as because I was a pretentious one. My bedroom library was stocked with such scholarly tomes as The Natural History of Love, Eros in the Modern World, the Kinsey Report and Ginzburg's own survey, An Unhurried View of Erotica. Of these books I remember little except odd bits of effluvia. Kinsey informed me that one in seven farm lads had engaged in, shall we say, animal husbandry ("Until," as Tom Lehrer would add, "they caught him at it"). From Ginzburg I learned that Benjamin...