Ralph Ginzburg, a scandalous editor and publisher of Eros, the magazine ”of sexual candour”, who was convicted in the 1960s for sending it through the mail, has died of cancer, media reports said on Friday.
Ginzburg died on Thursday at the age of 76 in New York.
He launched the short-lived but taboo-breaking Eros in 1962, a quarterly magazine of almost 100 pages devoted to erotic tales and revealing photo series.
It gained notoriety for publishing nude photos of Marilyn Monroe, taken by the photographer Bert Stern.
”Eros is a child of the times,” Ginzburg wrote in promoting his magazine. ”Eros takes full advantage of this new media freedom of expression. It is the magazine of sexual candour.”
The magazine lasted four issues before Ginzburg faced prosecution for distributing obscene material through the post — the only way Eros was distributed.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, ruling that obscenity was possible if the magazine’s ”sole emphasis is on the sexually explicit provocative aspects of his publication”.
He was sentenced to five years in prison in 1963, but served only eight months of his jail term.
Ginzburg, who said he never made money off Eros, published several books, including a work speaking out against racism called 100 Years of Lynchings (1962), and a collection of his newspaper photography called I Shot New York (1999). — AFP
