Bookplanet: collecting sex stuff

1. Naughty bits
Review of SEX COLLECTORS: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of "Erotica" by Geoff Nicholson.
By Dan Savage

THERE'S a box of porn in my basement. I don't want to say how big a box because, hey, size shouldn't matter. Let's just say it's smaller than it might be and bigger than it ought to be.

Most of the porn in that box predates the relationship I'm in now, and I haven't, er, consumed any of it in years, but I've hauled it from one home to another — eight moves total — in the last decade. I don't look at it, I don't like moving it … so why can't I bring myself to throw it away?

British novelist Geoff Nicholson lays out a theory in his new book, "Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of 'Erotica.' " I am a sex collector, distinctly lower case, and I hold onto my porn because it represents more than a means to an end.

Before Nicholson introduces us to his sex collectors — the only traits they seem to have in common are having too much time and too much money on their hands — he wrestles with a more fundamental question: Why do people amass collections at all? What motivates the man who collects toy trains? Or the woman who collects cats, live or porcelain? Nicholson quotes Sigmund Freud, who saw sex — no really, sex! — in there somewhere: "When an old maid keeps a dog or an old bachelor collects snuff-boxes, the former is finding a substitute for the need for a companion in marriage and the latter for his need for — a multitude of conquests."

But if a snuff-box collection is about sublimated sexual desire, Nicholson asks, what on earth is a Linda Lovelace memorabilia collection about? Or a collection of plaster casts of rock stars' penises? "If collecting is a nonsexual equivalent, then what are we to make of collections that are in themselves sexual?" Nicholson asks. "You can be as proud as you like of your stamp collection, and you can talk about it in terms of passion, lust, appetite, satisfaction, and so forth, but the one thing you can't do (unless you're weird to an off-the-map extent) is get aroused by it."

Sex collectors are not, or can't be, in a continual state of arousal as they build, catalog, arrange, dust and display their collections, so what are we to make of them? What's going on in their heads, apartments, private museums? A great many people "think all collecting is weird and sad per se," Nicholson admits, and are therefore inclined to view sex collecting as "weird, sad, and pervy ," but he isn't having it. We are all, he argues, sex collectors to some extent. (Is there a box of porn in your basement?) It's just that some of us are more passionate, more organized and more articulate about it than others.

The most interesting collector in the book is Naomi Wilzig, a 69-year-old Jewish widow who lives outside Tampa, Fla. Jet-lagged and unable to sleep, Nicholson catalogs the art in Wilzig's guest room: "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…. There are lesbian scenes, too, naturally, including one involving an enema."

Jet-lagged or not, who could possibly sleep in Wilzig's guest room?

Unlike the men's magazine collector profiled toward the end of the book, Wilzig got involved before the Internet, which simplified collecting but also drained the romance from it. Wilzig's collection was amassed not late at night sitting in front of a computer but on long buying trips, often to Europe, where she boxed up nude figurines, sexual automatons and fetish masks and sent them home to Florida. In fact, she began almost by accident. One of her sons asked her to buy him a nude painting while she was on a trip to Europe, and "having bought that first erotic painting, Naomi decided to buy herself a few more. Then she bought a male nude to keep them company." The rest, as they say, is history.

After Wilzig, Nicholson introduces us to a crowd of collectors, with fascinations that run the gamut from burlesque memorabilia to erotic automatons. Like all obsessives, they can be a bit long-winded when you get them cranked up about their passions. The same is true of Nicholson, who collects sex collectors, a realization we arrive at early on, although he doesn't come to it himself until the book's final paragraph. It doesn't help that Nicholson gamely puts the same question to all his collectors, a question that is as unnecessary as it is unanswerable: Why? Why 80,000 girlie magazines? Why dirty bookplates? Why pulp novels?

Equally problematic is his decision to organize the book by themes — some of them strained ("Women and Museums," "The Dealer and the Dealt With," "Collecting the Self and Others") — rather than personalities. Instead of profiling the collectors, Nicholson devotes entirely too much time to rummaging through their collections. At times, he is also too respectful. He's treading on delicate territory, since these people are opening their homes and, in some instances, the most intimate aspects of their psyches. Still, by constantly reassuring us of their basic decency, he presumes a degree of prudishness on his readers' part that seems unlikely. This is a book that will be read by people who derive a certain pervy pleasure from the limitless capacity of humans to be, well, pervy, and he needn't make excuses for his subjects' interests.

In his zeal to spend time with sex collectors, Nicholson rushes past some stories that seem infinitely more interesting. Does the Wig Club of Edinburgh really have a wig made from the pubic hair of Charles II's mistresses? Nicholson says it's probable, but he doesn't investigate, preferring to meet another collector who is, to my reading, much less compelling than the possibility of that wig. And what about Jesus' foreskin, "so much the ultimate collector's item that at one time there were a dozen or so of them in circulation"? I wanted to read more about Henry Hayler, whose London homes were raided by police in 1874, yielding "over 130,000 photographs and 5,000 slides, and … correspondence from satisfied customers all over Europe and America. According to press reports, Hayler, his wife, and two sons were recognizable in 'the more offensive pictures.' "

But these are relatively minor quibbles in a book that is often quite enjoyable to read.

Collecting, Nicholson writes, is "a form of preservation, a method of keeping order, a way of keeping chaos and death at bay…. [W]e're all engaged in what Walter Benjamin calls 'the struggle with dispersion.' … The collector brings things together in the full knowledge that sooner or later they will be dispersed. But while the collection exists, while the collector controls it, the chaos is being kept at bay. When that collection is a sexual one, there's also the possibility for eroticism and arousal, and, for want of a better term, erotic joy."

It is rare to meet a serious collector — no matter what the object of his or her affections — who isn't a bit odd. That Nicholson draws such a charming group portrait of these odder-than-most collectors makes it impossible not to share their joy.

(Dan Savage is the author of "Savage Love," a syndicated sex advice column, and editor of the Stranger, a weekly newspaper in Seattle.)


2. If You Show Me Yours -- by EMILY NUSSBAUM

"Andy, for the last time, I don't want your big box of porn!" Paul Rudd shouted in last year's sex comedy "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," backing out of the title character's apartment. It was a well-meaning ploy: Rudd, playing Andy's good friend, was actually the one who had collected the porn, and he was trying to force Andy to accept his precious cargo, hoping — with a pervy, wrongheaded generosity — that it would educate his buddy and enable him to get lucky.

The subjects of Geoff Nicholson's new book, "Sex Collectors," might sympathize with that impulse. After all, these are the people with the biggest boxes of porn imaginable — shiny heaps of nudie playing cards, walls studded with African fetish masks, display cases featuring snake-penis aphrodisiacs, Chinese lotus shoes, graphic photos from the Kinsey archive, slightly worn copies of Swank magazine, first editions of "Lolita" and testicular bookplates commissioned by Hitler . Some resemble Bond villains, others the guy next door, if you live next to an autodidact who loves spanking. But Nicholson tries his best to find the nugget of humanity, the passion within the obsessiveness, in each of his subjects.

He's such an appealing writer that you want him to succeed. Sadly, Nicholson's chosen territory turns out to be surprisingly unsexy. One might imagine the world of erotica hounds to be lively or at least titillating — a bit like Stefan Fatsis' book "Word Freak," except without all that intrusive Scrabble. But unlike Fatsis' nerdy savants, who compete in highly pressured tournaments, Nicholson's collectors just, well, collect. They purchase, they store. Sometimes they catalog. Once in a while, they go crazy and actually display something. But since they're not themselves having sex here or inventing anything sexual or even talking about sex or art or media in especially insightful ways, they don't cohere into anything but a collection of their own — a point Nicholson himself concedes, ruefully, in the book's final chapters.

Still, for quite a while, tagging along with Nicholson, a British novelist and a cheerful pervert himself, is compensation enough. Even without knowing that he is the author of a novel called "Footsucker" or the boyfriend of Dian Hanson, the editor of the porn magazine Leg Show, one senses that stiletto heels and spanking machines interest Nicholson more than most. He is at once a gabby, wide-eyed enthusiast and an epigram-spouting aesthete. He's also the rare writer capable of making reference to Jacques Lacan without inspiring the reader to toss his book out the window.

And despite his subject's limitations, Nicholson does meet some interesting folks. There's Naomi Wilzig, a foul-mouthed Jewish grandma and banking heiress who owns "a plastic head of Pinocchio with a penis for a nose, two carved wooden pigs having sex in the missionary position, multiple miniatures of that statue of Hercules and Diomedes by Vincenzo dei Rossi, you know the one — where they're wrestling and one of them's being held upside down and he's grabbed his opponent's penis: that one." There's Dixie Evans (the "Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque") and Cynthia Plaster Caster (the ex-groupie famous for her from-the-source replicas of rock-star genitals). He meets with Catherine Millet, author of "The Sexual Life of Catherine M.," and tries to get her to admit that she's a collector, only to be confounded by her seductive French opacity. ("I am not my body," she murmurs.) He meets with Joe Zinnato, a hip California dealer who lines the walls of his home with stills from the movie "International Smorgasbroad" and the architect Tristan Rees-Roberts, who prefers naked paintings of his own family.

Investigating why people might collect such stuff, Nicholson covers Marx, Freud, Kinsey and the requisite French thinkers; he considers the way collecting staves off the passage of time, allows one to merge one's erotic and aesthetic interests — or to use one as a cover for the other. In a California trailer park, he meets up with Patrick J. Kearney, an erotic bibliographer who describes an argument he had with yet another erotic bibliographer, Gershon Legman, after Kearney pointed out an error in something called "The Whippingham Papers." In defense, Legman demanded to know why Kearney was so interested in "The Whippingham Papers" in the first place; was he a pervert or something? "This struck me as a low blow from one erotic bibliographer to another," Nicholson observes. "If they started accusing each other of being perverts then the whole house of cards would fall down."

As Nicholson acknowledges, his book is not even close to comprehensive. There's very little gay material, for instance, and one suspects that Nicholson is more interested in female collectors than male ones. But whereas other authors might shore themselves up with false authority, this writer makes his struggles transparent: he tells us who turned him down for an interview (Pee-wee Herman, for one) and spins comedy out of his failed attempts to get his subjects to be a bit more analytical. Even when he meets his ultimate collector, Karl-Ludwig Leonhardt, a reclusive former executive at Bertelsmann, the German publishing company, he presents the encounter not as a triumph but as yet another snub. "I felt I was given the very basic tour of the collection, not the V.I.P.'s or connoisseur's tour, but that was certainly his prerogative," he worries, and notes that "the tape of our conversation shows me burbling more and more, and his answers becoming ever shorter and less articulate."

Such humility is endearing, but also self-defeating. It's perhaps unkind, but also true, that I found myself thinking wistfully that I'd prefer to have talked to Nicholson about his book at a dinner party than to have actually read it. However many puckish asides he serves up — "If this is the sort of thing you like, you're going to like this sort of thing a lot," he notes at one point — even the liveliest account of someone else's collection finally shrivels to a list of lists of lists. And as Freud might have told the 40-year-old virgin, sometimes even the biggest box of porn is just a big box.

(Emily Nussbaum is the culture editor of New York magazine.)