VICE ! 10 Original Press Photographs from the Golden Days of Obscenity collection Jim Linderman

The doorway to the Book Shack photograph by John Collier 1973 Free Press (Detroit?)

Candy Barr Stripped of Freedom 1957 photographer unknown, no source indicated

Pornography businesses line part of 66th Street N in Pinellas Park 1979 photograph by Barbara Hansen St. Petersberg Times

An interior view of the lobby office at the Geisha House which is a massage parlor and peep show at 414 West 42nd Street.  The two gentlemen pictured are employees  1972 photographer unknown, New York Times

King's News raid  1961 photograph, source unknown

After some local residents complained and called the sign lewd and indecent, the North Hempstead Town Board asked him to add more clothes to the sign  1957 photographer unknown N. E. A.

 Peep Shows 1953?  Photograph by Knefel Chicago Sun Times

Vice raid  1957 photograph by Clarence B. Garrett The Sun Papers

New York minister holds news stand magazines that caused objections 1963  AP wirephoto photographer unknown

Customs officers check the books in preparation for burning 1964 photographer unknown Keystone Press Agency




 

Mimeographed Amateur Pornography from 1950s Mexico 7 Zephyrs Press

7 Zephyrs Press was a primitive smut publisher working just over the border in Juarez and Tijuana, Mexico.  By 1955, the modest business had published well over 200 individually numbered titles.  Each had primitive drawings to illustrate the deviant goings on.  Real collectors items.  The company also ran a lending library!  Not a collector?  Buy one, read it and return for another.  Each title seems to have been "cranked out" in editions of 100 or so.  Historians are aware that technological inventions are first used to spread erotic content...in this case, the mimeograph machine.     

Assorted editions of 7 Zephyrs Press erotic novels.  Collection Dull Tool Dim Bulb

Cultural Detritus of Horror: Truck Stop Pornographic Eight Track Tapes

Imagine a guy hauling a double trailer-rig, jacked-up on speed with one hand on the wheel and one in his pants.  The CONCEPT is as bad as the vision...but here comes "Spanky" with a big load.  Pun reluctantly intended.  File these pornographic eight-track tapes under "Cultural detritus" which should  have never happened. 

Someone is driving at dark and listening to cheap, truck stop smut EIGHT TRACK TAPES! 

Online, I find a few sources for information about pornographic eight track tapes.  I CAN tell you there were at least 57 in this series, as I have both number 000 and 057 here.  Collect them ALL.  Local entrepreneurs likely churned them out in seedy neighborhoods along the highway.

These obscurities would fall into the "spoken word" category of recorded sound collecting, but I don't think the fellow who purchased these originally would have alternated the playlist with a stirring speech from Winston Churchill or Robert Frost reading his poetry. 

Everyone understands by now that every advance in media is taken over by sex somehow.  From the camera to the VCR and beyond.  But eight tracks?  Don't come knocking if the rig is rocking SOLO.

All three here were decorated by the same artist.   I guess "cartoonist" is more appropriate.  The scrapheap of popular culture has spit out yet another relic of horror.

Group of X-rated Eight Track Tapes.  No date.  Circa 1970. 

The Tawdry Origins of Glamour Photography Proto Porn the Book

During the 1950s, under the ruse of "Art Studies" and "Figure Studies" businessman skirted the law publishing hundreds of digest-sized primitive camera art photographs of nearly nude women. Seldom dated, by somewhat disreputable publishers, the digests featured burlesque dancers and models such as Bettie Page in makeshift studios, and were among the first books to challenge censorship and the conventions of the times as it related to photographs of the female form. The tawdry origins of Glamour Photography! The booklets are today scarce and seldom seen. Dubbed Proto-Porn, over 100 have been collected in book form by the first time by Jim Linderman. Proto-Porn details the publishers and addresses the conflicting notions of art and nudity of the Eisenhower years. Colorful, disreputable and quasi-legal, the books nonetheless pre-date modern-day fashion and nude photography. Tame by any standard today, the books have not been shown in over 50 years, and never before collected in a book.

The book PROTO-PORN : THE ART FIGURE STUDY SCAM OF THE 1950s is available as a $5.99 ebook download for iPad or Paperback HERE