Tag Archives: Amerian erotica

RIP Earl Kemp (1929 – 2020)

Earl Kemp was an American publisher, science fiction editor and critic.

Illustrated edition of Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1970)

During the 1960s and 1970s, Earl Kemp was involved in publishing erotic paperbacks through a company, Greenleaf Publishing, where he was employed by William Hamling. In an example of détournement, in 1970 Kemp published an Illustrated edition of the Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. According to Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide, the book was “replete with the sort of photographs the commission examined.” Kemp eventually was sentenced to a one-year prison sentence for distributing the book (as was Hamling). However, both served only the federal minimum of three months and one day. The story of their arrest and prison time was covered in Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife (1981).

RIP Larry Flynt (1942 – 2021)

Larry Flynt was the publisher of American pornographic magazine Hustler, founded in 1974 in the slipstream of the sexual revolution.

I show you an interview from 2014.

In the opening splash you see — at the right hand side — the controversial cover of a woman who is fed to a meat grinder.

Flynt was a rebel. Many pornographers were. That’s what used to make pornography so interesting during the early modern period up until the sexual revolution.