Sex Collectors

The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of ',Erotica',

Geoff Nicholson

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780743265874
• eBook ISBN: 9780743293341
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Though you might not encounter the subject in Artforum or stumble across it at Sotheby's, the thriving business of erotica is a mixture of sophistication and seduction, an underground world of eccentric artists and serious collectors. In Sex Collectors, Geoff Nicholson hunts down an assortment of these obsessives around the world. From the Florida grandma with five million dollars' worth of sexual collectibles to Third Eye Blind's manager, who owns more than eighty thousand men's magazines, Nicholson celebrates these collectors and the occasionally beautiful, frequently bizarre, and always fascinating objects they have amassed. He accompanies Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, as she is taken on a tour of a collection devoted to her. Days spent in the Kinsey archives reveal the cultural artifacts resulting from the sexual awakening of public America, as well as boxes with labels such as "Phallus with Agricultural Tools" and "Scarf Trick when Folded." Nicholson journeys to Germany to visit with the legendary Karl-Ludwig Leonhardt, sex collector extraordinaire of first edition volumes such as Flagellation pour couples pervertis and Tender Bottoms, erotic Picassos, and notes handwritten by the Marquis de Sade. Throughout his exploration of some of the wildest collections in the world, Nicholson's discussion of collecting as an expression of self and psychology goes hand in hand with his gleeful discovery of the seventh giant phallus used in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Hitler's creepily erotic personalized bookplate, and a woman who has a plaster cast of Jimi Hendrix's penis. Sex Collectors is a winning story of one man's attempt to collect collectors, to reveal the neuroses that drive some people to collect, and to have good, dirty, high-minded fun while doing it.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Also by Geoff Nicholson
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 An Introduction: The usual throat clearing, my father’s gnomic wisdom, anal retention, less than full disclosure, living with and without a sex collection.
• 2 Women and Museums: Wilzig, Kubrick, Evans, Homer.
• 3 Some History, Some Theory: Hair, horn, holy foreskins; Benjamin, Freud, Marx, Aljasmets. Aljasmets?
• 4 Collecting the Self and Others: Lotus shoes, fingernails, art, the penis in plaster.
• 5 The Numbers Game: Hatred, repellent behavior, a scoreboard, a garment of shame, a melancholy archive.
• 6 Some Erotic Bibliographers—Bloomsbury to Santa Rosa: An erotomaniac and an erotomane.
• 7 Ex Libris and an Ex-Actress: The commissioner and the commissioned.
• 8 New York Boys and Girls: Connoisseurs, trade, sanity, and order.
• 9 The Dealer and the Dealt With: Statistics, aesthetic consolidation, cynicism, the conveyor belt of acquisition.
• 10 What I Did at the Kinsey: A belief in data, increasing your happiness, the Documentary Collection, the missing “Spicies.”
• 11 The Fatherland, the Mother Lode: Porn art, an old Etonian, a book club, some barbed wire, a failed collector.
• Bibliography
• About the Author