"I have bawdy house coins from whorehouses in the 1860s... One coin says, '10 cents for lookie, 25 cents for feelie, 50 cents for doie.'"

Said Ralph Whittington, quoted in "Ralph Whittington, erotica collector extraordinaire, dies at 74" (WaPo). What do you have to do to become noteworthy for your porn collection? Whittington — whose job was as a curator at the Library of Congress — amassed and carefully catalogued a huge collection of pornography.

For years, he stored his trove — which included thousands of items, from 19th-century 'bawdy house coins' to magazines, videotapes, photographs, dolls and devices — at his Clinton, Md., home, which he shared with his mother..... Mr. Whittington noted 86 separate categories.... "To be blunt, most people buy for their own gratification. But I would spend money on stuff I didn’t even like. I like high heels and big legs, but I collected everything — except gay porn and child porn."

Maybe there's a Ralph Whittington of gay porn somewhere.

"I have one film from 1913 called ‘Free Ride,’ which is supposed to be [the] oldest film they’ve found in the U.S.” He had a copy of the first commercial sex videotape sold to the general public, a version of “Deep Throat” playable only on an obsolete Betamax machine. ...

He didn't collect — I don't want to use the word "digital" — computer porn.

In 1999, Mr. Whittington sold most of his materials to the Museum of Sex, a professionally curated institution in New York. Before three 16-foot trucks hauled away almost 10,000 items in 848 boxes, his house was packed from floor to ceiling. Videotapes shared space in the pantry next to cereal boxes, and sex tapes were stacked in his mother’s closet....

Mr. Whittington, who was a consultant to the Erotic Heritage Museum in Las Vegas and the now-defunct Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, sometimes mocked academics as people who “will read nine books on brothels and write the 10th one and never go to a brothel.”...

For a fee, an adult-film star named Chessie Moore offered members of her fan club the opportunity to make an explicit videotape with her. As Moore’s husband ran the camera, Mr. Whittington directed and took part in the action. Moore later autographed her spike-heel pumps, which Mr. Whittington added to his collection.

Here's a little documentary about him:


King of Porn from Jeff Krulik on Vimeo.