Lifting the veil on New York Public Library’s erotica collection
*** marked books and material that were deemed too hot for the general reader to handle
NEW YORK—***, called. When *** was handwritten on books and periodicals in the New York Public Library’s permanent collection, it meant one thing: supervision required.
The triple-star code, created some time in the first part of the 20th century, identified the printed works that were considered too hot for the general reader to handle.
Playboy was once classified with a triple star. So were raunchy pulp novels, flyers for Times Square massage parlours, business cards offering phone sex for $2 a minute, even playing cards with illustrations of naked women.
For decades, they were kept in locked cages, accessible only with special permission and viewed in a small, secured area in the main research library.
More recently, hundreds of works that make up the triple-star collection have been liberated from the restricted controls. An adult with a library card can simply fill out a request and peruse the material on the premises. (The library maintains a
the symbol was filter system to restrict access to erotic materials on the Internet.)
“Erotica was not something we were particularly going after, but we needed to collect life as it was lived,” said Jason Baumann, a collections curator. “We needed to understand and document for history what the city of New York was like. That meant collecting the good and the bad. It was always part of our mandate.”
Aguided visit to the library revealed some of the richness of its erotic (or pornographic, depending on who was doing the classification) material. The works are hidden treasures, many of them awaiting discovery. Not even the curators and librarians know everything that is there.
“There were many materials in the library’s special collections that I had never seen before,” Baumann said. “The range and depth of our collections never ceases to astonish me.”
The main building of the public library had such an impact on the neighbourhood that there was once a massage parlour a block away on West 43rd Street named the Library. A 1976 flyer in the *** collection advertised its $10, tip-included service, with “7 Beautiful Librarians to Service You.” The flyer shows a longhaired “librarian” dressed in a necklace and high heels. A large bunch of feathers covers her private parts.
As part of the library’s mandate to collect life as it was lived, small teams of librarians were dispatched in the 1970s to Times Square pornography shops to scoop up representative samples of the latest erotica. Among the paperback titles in the collection: Animal Urge, The 48-Hour Orgy, Beach Stud and All Day Sucker.
“The bookstore owners hated it when we showed up,” said Christopher Filstrup, a former librarian who was part of the shopping brigade. “But we loved it. Books and magazines were organized just the way librarians do it, by subject — fetish, S and M, black and white, that kind of thing. Since I was head of the Oriental Division my assignment was Asians. Oh, I did chubby too.”
The pulp novels and sexually explicit how-to books were printed on such poor-quality paper that the bulk of them were preserved on microfilm; the originals were discarded.
But hundreds were kept, including books disguised as sociology whose aim was titillation. They had titles such as Mass Orgasms: A Study of Group Sex Activity and Fornication and the Law.
The library has highbrow erotica as well. Deep in the Berg rare book collection, for example, is a work that has never been publicly displayed: William Faulkner’s pencil drawings of him and Meta Carpenter Wilde, his mistress, having sex.
Wilde gave the drawings to the library on the condition that they remain inaccessible until the death of Faulkner’s daughter, Jill Faulkner Summers, who died in 2008.
“No researchers have been in to see them, but they certainly could do so,” said Isaac Gewirtz, the Berg’s curator of literary manuscripts.
Gewirtz displayed the drawings on along table along with other prizes in his collection, including Henry Miller’s typewritten manuscript for Tropic of Capricorn, with his handwritten edits; a 1947 humorous, pornographic cartoon by Jack Kerouac; a first edition of a pornographic poem by W.H. Auden; a first edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s English-language novel Lolita, published in Paris in 1955 after Nabokov failed to find a publisher in the United States.
The triple-star classification turned out to have been wider than materials related to sex. Works with a high potential for theft were also included. One of them was a first edition of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses; another, a first edition of the 1928 English translation of the 1923 Austrian novel Bambi. The one about the deer.