Table of Contents   ::   Introduction, The Smut Peddlers by Adam Parfrey   ::   Softcore Publishing: The East Coast Scene, By Jay Gertzman   ::   West Coast Blue, By Stephen J. Gertz   ::   Cover excerpts from all chapters   ::   Sin-A-Rama front and back covers


West Coast Blue
Stephen J. Gertz
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The 1960s began in 1957.

That was the year the United States Supreme Court upheld publisher Samuel Roth’s conviction for manufacturing and selling obscene material. The Court rejected Roth’s argument that obscenity was protected by the First Amendment.

But in Roth the Court developed a three-part formula for defining obscenity. The material had to appeal to the prurient interest of the average person, violate contemporary community standards, and be without redeeming social value. While ostensibly drawing a line in the sand, most obscenity cases since the 1930s ironically wound up obscuring that line.

In 1966, the Supreme Court was asked again to decide on obscenity. The case was Massachusetts vs. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (aka Fanny Hill), which had been wending its way through the appellate process since 1963, when the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided the book to be obscene. Now the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a work could not be proscribed unless it was, in the majority opinion of Justice Brennan, “utterly without redeeming social value. This is so even though the book is found to possess the requisite prurient appeal and to be patently offensive.”

Suddenly, community standards regarding prurient interest were trumped by any value whatsoever. The publication of almost the entire corpus of explicit erotic literature became a reality. This was an epochal event, heralding nothing less than the democratization of reading in this country, for this kind of literature had prior been almost exclusively available to the wealthy or well-connected only, printed in small editions and generally cost-prohibitive for the average citizen.

With few exceptions, all porn book publishers of the era marketed and distributed books as they did their magazines: a 30-day shelf life with new titles to turn over every month. The publications looked like books but were actually magazines in book drag. Publishers played the numbers game, with profits based upon aggregate sales for the entire line. Newsstands, drug stores, liquor stores, cigar stores, any place that had space for a wire bookrack, were the primary point of sale.

Continued...

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