I had the pleasure of meeting Ralph Ginzburg years ago and was sad to find out today from the person who introduced me to this fascinating man that he had passed away yesterday. It's odd because I had been thinking about him and his work a few weeks ago when I started writing a blog piece on the importance of zines (that I never got around to finishing). I had focussed a lot of the post on his publications, Eros, specifically, as I wanted to look at the history of small press publishing and censorship (essentially non-corporate publishing and the importance of zines as opposed to 4-color glossies or even self-published novels). Certainly Ginzburg, if he is known to you, is most likely known through his two First Amendment trials in the 1960s, but he was also an accomplished author, photojournalist, and typographer (the font Avant Garde is from his magazine Avant Garde). And, unlike, say, Larry Flynt, Ginzburg's publications though provocative, leaned more toward the form of erotic art, and included poems, photography, and political and cultural satire--high brow, as it were (another magazine he published, Fact, which called Republican Senator Barry Goldwater's psychological background into question, had him in the courts for years).
Ginzburg began his career as a freelance writer and photographer, and even had a brief stint writing for TV. He spent some time at Look and Esquire, before publishing his the best-selling book, An Unhurried View of Erotica. It was from this book (originally an article for Esquire) that he got the idea for Eros which was produced as a quarterly in beautiful hardcover editions. Ironically (or not), it was his promotional mailings for the mag and not its actual content that made him the subject of Obscenity charges (he chose towns such as Middlesex and Intercourse for mailing his magazine) that eventually led to his serving 8-months in prison. He wrote about his ordeal in his book Castrated: My Eight Months in Prison.
He died in a Bronx hospice after battling multiple myeloma, he was 76-years-old.
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