Permissiveness in publishing has come a long way. Today almost every corner newsstand offers as titillating a peep show as the old burlesque houses ever managed—and nobody is there to ring down the curtain. Dozens of "girlie" magazines wink at the casual browser; even at the local bookseller's, the shelves are loaded with books that once had to be bought under the counter in Paris and smuggled past customs.
But elastic as the limits may be, there are still limits. Last week two publishers accused of violating them were in trouble with the law.
Patently Offensive. The first to take a fall was aggressive, Brooklyn-born Ralph Ginzburg, 33, a onetime Esquire staffer with a sharp eye for a salable commodity that is spelled sex. In 1958 he published An Unhurried View of Erotica, a sort of bibliography of banned books, and sold 275,000 copies. Last year he began publishing Eros, a quarterly "devoted to the joy of love." At $10 a copy, Eros offers little more than what can be picked up by a determined voyeur with scissors and a library card—a reworking of Lysistrata, ribald pieces by De Maupassant and Balzac, Frank Harris' My Life and Loves—but Ginzburg claims he now has a circulation of 150,000.
The Government began keeping an eye on Eros after 25,000 letters poured into the Postmaster General's Office complaining about the magazine's oversexed promotional pamphlets. Ginzburg "used every publicity gimmick in the book to almost force us to ban it," said one official, even down to mailing the magazines from towns like Intercourse, Pa., Middlesex, N.J., and Blueballs, Pa. Finally the Justice Department haled Ginzburg into the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia on 28 counts of mailing obscene matter—the winter issue of Eros, a newsletter of current events on the sex front called Liaison, and The Housewife's Handbook on Selective Promiscuity, a Tucson woman's clinically detailed sexual autobiography that covers her activities from age 3 to 36.
Ginzburg marshaled 65 psychologists, sexologists and assorted literati to testify. Lillian Maxine Serett, who wrote The Housewife's Handbook under the pen name Key Anthony, told the court, "Women's role in sex is widely misunderstood. Women do have sexual rights." Essayist Dwight Macdonald testified that he found inoffensive a "photographic tone poem" in Eros showing a nude Negro man and a nude white woman in eight pages of assorted full-color embraces. But when it came to Liaison and The Housewife's Handbook, even Macdonald drew the line. They were, he said, "vulgar and of no literary value."
Assistant U.S. Attorney J. Shane Creamer found the publications worse than that. They are "patently offensive" and "go beyond the customary limits that society tolerates," said he. Judge Ralph C. Body apparently agreed. Last week the judge convicted Ginzburg on all 28 counts—leaving the publisher liable to fines as high as $140,000 and 140 years in prison when he is sentenced, sometime in the next few weeks.