Ralph Ginzburg, who died last month at age 76, was a publisher, a direct marketer, an author and a photographer. But he will be most remembered for the eight months he served in jail in 1972.
First Amendment absolutists will always hold him in high esteem. But so, we believe, should DMers.
Ginzburg's first brush with direct marketing came at age 10 in 1939, when he ordered Dale Carnegie's book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” through an ad in Boy's Life magazine. He read it on the Brooklyn subway, “poring over every syllable of that book, committing it to memory,” he said during a speech at Marty Edelston's DM Old-Timer's Day a decade ago. “Of course, reading the book in that way, I didn't finish it until I was 19.”
Later, after working at various publishing jobs, Ginzburg started his own magazine, Eros, launching it with a $400 direct mailing. Designed by the renowned Herb Lubalin, it was recently described by Steven Heller, a New York Times art director, as “a stunningly designed hardcover ‘magbook’ devoted to eroticism.”
One entertaining feature was a page of mail order ads from the 1800s, mostly for products to “enlarge small male organs when caused by self-abuse.”
But Eros lasted only four issues. And it got Ginzburg into serious trouble, although he was never prosecuted for the magazine itself but for the marketing he did for it.
One offense was sending a mailing postmarked Middlesex, NJ, according to The New York Sun. Another antic was to send a direct mail piece for “The Housewife's Handbook on Selective Promiscuity” to doctors on the American Medical Association list.
Denied further access to those names, he sent out a second mailing to physicians, proclaiming: “The AMA does not want you to open this envelope.”
The trial was one of the great spectacles of the 1960s. Ginzburg showed up in court wearing a Panama hat and boutonniere.
But he was convicted, and that verdict was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice William Brennan wrote that the “leer of the sensualist also permeates the advertising for these publications.”
How unjust. Was it really the marketing that offended public officials? Or was it the photos of a nude, mixed-race couple featured in the fourth issue?
Either way, Ginzburg emerged from jail a changed man, according to his wife and creative partner Shoshana Ginzburg. The mischievousness was gone, she said during a conversation in 1994.
But maybe not totally. Ginzburg made a living creating mailing lists, and his sense of humor was apparent in the advertising. For example, he once ran an ad inviting people to sign up for free gifts.
The art? A photo of a woman with her arms open. The headline? “Hi, my name is Jill Jigelewski. Respond to me.”
He also started several other magazines, including Moneysworth, sometimes testing the idea before deciding to publish.
“America, from Benjamin Franklin's time, enjoyed a tradition of allowing publishers to solicit prepaid subscriptions for a magazine that had not yet appeared in just this very way,” Ginzburg said during the old-timer's day. Indeed, the word subscribe “derives from the Latin for ‘underwrite,’” he noted.
Everyone in the audience was waiting to hear more about that. But Ginzburg, by now a freelance photographer for the New York Post, showed his maverick nature once again. He spent the rest of his presentation time displaying his bird photos.
