Sex Collectors
The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators,
Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of Erotica
by James William Johnson

Book Review by Rob Hardy

Who is doing the collecting? Generally, people with a lot of money, for originals are not cheap and the collections are often extensive. Take Naomi Wilzig, of whom the National Examiner headlined, "GRANNY Proves You're Never Too Old for PORNO!" She is welcoming to Nicholson, even inviting him to stay overnight in her guest bedroom. Perhaps it was jetlag, perhaps it was just the objects themselves, but instead of sleeping, he begins cataloging the room's décor: "Pre-Raphaelite nudes in sylvan settings, and in a more modern style there's a painting of a pair of naked women scrambling down a steep rocky slope. More modern still, and way more garish, is a painting of Bettie Page done in electric primary colors…. There's plenty of overtly gay male stuff…." He gets to see many of the other things Wilzig has collected, but realizes (as he does over and over in other collections) that he is barely seeing the tiniest sample. She has, for instance, a huge white phallic object that is the one that Alex wielded as a bludgeon in A Clockwork Orange; it isn't the actual one from the movie, but seems to be a genuine version by the original artist. She has lots of junk, like replicas of figurines found in Pompeii or a piggy bank shaped like a sperm, and also fine French Art Nouveau. She is able to finance her collection because her husband was a millionaire banker; he had no interest in her collection, and since they didn't get along well, she may have accumulated in order to annoy him. Nicholson explains that like other collectors, she enjoyed that her collection "… made her special, unusual, a little bit notorious, and it guaranteed that she got attention." She enjoys showing the collection in her home, but is having a museum built so that we can all see it someday.

Another great collector was Alfred Kinsey, although he is better known, of course, for his interviews and his reports on the sexuality of Americans. "Kinsey believed in data," Nicholson writes, and was trained as a biologist; he collected hundreds of thousands of gall wasps, his specialty, and when he moved into investigating sex, he collected anything having to do with it. The enormous collection at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction in Bloomington, Indiana, includes "…erotic artworks and artifacts, about seven thousand items, everything from Picassos to pornographic ashtrays. There are about seventy-five thousand photographs, professional and amateur, arty to obscene. In addition to the films shot by the institute under Kinsey's direction, there is footage of animals mating, anthropological movies, porn films, erotic 'art' movies: eight thousand films, four thousand videos." The collection is a scholarly one, but scholasticism is hindered by its current means of accumulation; Kinsey collects no longer, of course, but people donate to the Kinsey Institute, and they often do so anonymously. "People donate to the Kinsey having reached the stage of their lives when they want to get rid of their collections." Also, police departments donate sex-related materials taken from offenders. Nicholson gets a tour through a few of the innumerable boxes of the collection, guided by the institute's curator, who wears cotton gloves to protect all the objects she handles for display.

If there are collectors, there must be dealers, although "each considers the other a necessary evil". Some of them enjoy wonderful items going through their hands and being passed on (at profit) with no impulse to own any of them; others buy and sell to make a living, but also to improve their own collections. Such a collection is Eros Archives, run by Joe Zinnato and his longtime girlfriend. Running such a business is not without its risk; when Zinnato's name was found in a pedophile's address book, the Los Angeles cops barged in in the middle of the night, grabbing whatever they wanted from his stock and also from his personal collection. Zinnato is careful not to carry child pornography, but that did him no good. A long legal process got him his stock back, but not all of it. There was one box that the cops were very eager to have him take back, but his lawyer advised him to leave that one on police shelves; it seemed likely that they had planted something they wanted to arrest him for. Zinnato has racks of nudie playing cards, photos, erotic figurines, and plenty of magazines like Bizarre, Bondage Life, and so on. One thing he does not have is Playboys. For the serious collector, it is worth having the first Playboy, the one with Marilyn Monroe, and maybe the one with Bettie Page in it, but the rest are worth little. He typically gets a call from someone who wants to sell his all the Playboys he has bought and lovingly cared for over the years, and when "… Joe fails to salivate at the chance to buy the collection, the seller asks what he should do with it. Joe suggests the Dumpster."

There are many other collectors and collections here. Cynthia Plaster Caster has spent decades making plaster casts of famous people's penises, and has branched out into breasts. There's the small collection of lotus shoes, the kind that were worn by Chinese women whose feet had been bound. There's a collection of 80,000 girlie magazines. There is a large group of people who collect erotic book plates, and commission them. Nicholson eventually helps us realize that we are all sex collectors; we may not look for something to put on our shelves, but we do, if health and opportunity allow, amass sexual experiences. He also comes to the conclusion that he is a bit of collector himself, not necessarily of the type of item the more generous of the collectors profiled here sent him away with, but a collector of sex collectors, an activity that has involved such familiar endeavors as finding interesting examples, doing negotiations, lucking out on good finds, and other things that collectors here do. His is a unique collection, and it is generously shared in a breezy, amusing book.

Sex Collectors by Geoff Nicholson
(Simon & Schuster; May 23, 2006; ISBN: 0743265874)
Available at: Amazon.com / Amazon UK

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© 2006 Rob Hardy. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.

About the Reviewer: 
Rob Hardy is a psychiatrist who lives in Columbus, Mississippi, with his wife, two terriers, five cats, and goldfish.

He reviews nonfiction for The Times of Acadiana, but has been reviewing books as a hobby for years before that.
Email: Rob Hardy

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