The Adult Book Stores


part of a sign in a Times Square adult book store, preserved
at the Durst Old York Library,  City University
of New York.


  By the late sixties, midtown erotica browsers would have satisfied their fantasies amid the configuration of shelves, peg-boards, and display tables which we remember as the “adult book store.” A sign out front often read, “Be 18 or be gone.” Display windows were arranged so that the passer-by, who might be underage, an offended citizen, or a plain-clothes policeman, could not see into the shop. On a platform near the entrance was the cashier’s desk and the cash register. A panoply of mirrors often allowed the clerk to discourage shoplifting. The premium items–magazines, paperback booklets often of a fetishistic nature, photo sets and “strip-tease” photos of nearly naked women touching their breasts or crotches--were displayed in a “highliner” or center table. Along the walls on pegboards were displayed more photos and magazines, 8mm films, slides, bawdy records, playing cards, and sex toys and devices. Racks of paperbacks and magazines were often divided into categories of kink. Except for the paperbacks on racks, printed materials  were wrapped in cellophane. The more eye-opening bondage, flagellation, and
“water sports” might be near the back of the store, as could be the group sex material, or the “beaver” or “spreader” illustrations of women displaying their vaginas.  These might be under the counter items, along with “French decks,” if the models showed pubic hair. Any material depicting genital or oral-genital penetration was not displayed. There were also shelves for attractive art portfolios of nudes, marriage manuals, scholarly or “clinical” studies of sexual attitudes and customs, “physical health” books, the Kinsey reports, classical erotology such as the Kama Sutra, or the recently decensored sexually explicit novels. These might be trotted out for window display when a court ruling or clean-up crusade meant police action loomed–in fact the store owners had an electronic early-warning system set up.

   The Eighth Avenue bookstores and those on 42nd between 7th and 8th were exclusively adult by 1970, and they were evolving into the sex emporia of the 1980s. Times Square was the scene of two key events in the history of commercialized sex which heralded the change. In the mid-sixties Martin Hodas, an inventive vending machine salesman, placed peep booths in several bookstores. As he put it, they attracted “doctors, lawyers, tourists, kids, fags. Everybody.”  Landlords, knowing a bonanza when they saw one, raised rents, which forced out many of the delis, haberdasheries,  “fascination” and pinball games, and small eateries–although it is important to recognize that even in the 1980s, Times Square remained a low-cost entertainment center for people of all ages and ethnic backgrounds who could not afford more expensive restaurants, movie theaters, bookstores, clothing, or small appliances. Hodas bought the leases,
and by 1967 was “King of the Strip,” with many adult stores, some of which he changed into massage parlors. He made the right mob connections to insure efficient distribution of his loops.  Many of these were produced by the photographer George Urban–“Ugly George” of recent cable fame--who knew how to convince beautiful young women to appear in them.  The second event occurred in 1965, when Robert Redrup, a Times Square newsstand dealer, sold to an undercover  policeman two soft core sex pulp paperbacks. The ensuing case resulted in the Supreme Court, which was badly divided on criteria for obscenity, adopting a policy of reversing without comment (“Redruping”) all obscenity convictions which reached it.

   Thanks in part to Hodas and Redrup, hard-core was to have its way. Not even Frank S. Hogan could do much, as the Lindsay administration knew. In 1968, it harassed bookstore owners by placing uniformed policemen in some shops to monitor any under-the-counter sales, but this tactic was quickly ruled unconstitutional. It was difficult in any event to know what was prosecutable as hard core. Browsers in the late 50s and earlier 60s will remember the paperbacks from such outfits as Nightstand, Pleasure Readers, Sundown, Pendulum, Merit, Brandon House, Midwood, or Lancer. There was the semblance of a plot between the bedroom scenes, and the latter were euphemistically described, with words like  “joysticks” and “moist womanhoods” all too frequent. No four-letter words escaped the lips of panting revelers.
 






A soft core paperback, by "Ennis Willie," published by Merit Books in 1963.











    But in 1969, after the f-word and the images of oral sex and penetration in Donald H. Gilmore’s excellent study  Sex, Censorship and Pornography (Greenleaf Classics) brought little protest, sex pulps were largely supplemented by “fuck books.” Click here for an excellent resource on Greenleaf and the soft core paperback publishers and writers of this period.