Bob's Bargain Books
Bob Brown was an important bookman from the mid-50s
through the mid-70s. He started by trying to sell very cheap, practical
books which publishers had
remaindered to people in need of technical know-how to keep their
businesses viable. This did not
exactly pay the rent. What did was soft core erotica. The midtown
gay subculture wanted relevant books
and magazines. Patrons liked girlie pictures, whether in calendars,
playing cards, slides,
magazines, and books. Apparently, the closeness of “the Deuce” to bus
terminals and cheap
hotels meant that there were many newly arrived young women available
to pose. Brown himself
did not take advantage of this, but many neighborhood photographers
did; the pictures appeared in
books and magazines. The store also had some primitive peep show
machines. One popular loop
showed people having intercourse–from a discreet distance.
The scene down 42nd Street from Bob's Bargain Books, 105 W42nd,
in 1967: to the right of the theater and Tad's is the Bee See Book Shop,
at 117 W42nd, target of police raids in the late 1960s.
Some of the most resourceful Times Square book
people, like Wilson and Shapiro, were involved in manufacturing,
distributing, and wholesaling, for that was
where the real money was. GI Distributors, founded by two veterans
after World War II, was one of
these. Bob Brown was another. In 1968, the Brown Book Company published
remainder copies of
Joe Weiss’ Bitter Pill, touted in the
“socio-psychological foreword” by one Dr. Hugo G.
Beigel as “stand[ing] for and dynamically illustrat[ing] the entire
sexual revolution!” The story
involves campus free sex, lesbianism, spouse swapping, water sports and
spanking. Weiss dwelt in
loving detail on the latter in this and other books. A “forthcoming”
work was to be entitled The
Spanking Lovers, to which Dr. Beigel would contribute a
“clinical study.”
Bob Brown won an important legal battle in 1967,
with the help of now-legendary First Amendment attorney Herald Price
Fahringer. The FBI seized 419 cartons
of books flown to New York from Minneapolis. The cartons
contained glossy photos of
female nudes, and nudist and male art magazines, which did not meet
obscenity criteria. The titles
represent what a reader would see on the shelves of Times Square book
shops in the sixties:
Hombre, Rugged, Bronco, Nudist European Women, Coquette,
KrazyKittens. Brown also offered
paperback versions of Fanny Hill
and of Victorian pornography, probably
the Collector’s
Publications piracies or the Grove Press or Brandon House
editions. In another brush with the
law, Bob, remarkably, pled guilty to selling “obscenity” of much the
same nature. He therefore
waived his right of appeal, and even more remarkably, was sent to Sing
Sing. Perhaps he had run out of
money, and did not want to burden his family with legal costs. And
possibly, his plea
would have removed from prosecution one of his sons, against whom
charges also had been
brought. He wanted both his sons to carry on in bookselling without
being singled out as “smut
kingpins” by a police captain
or district attorney with a mind to do so.