Back in the Saddle

The days during and following the annual OBFT interlude tend to be sparse here from both a content perspective and the quality of thought on offer. I aim to make no particular improvement in the latter, though I suppose this is definitive evidence of the former.

I understand that my man TR is in need of some balm for his injured self, and so I offer this obituary headline from today's Washington Post:

Ralph Whittington, erotica collector extraordinaire, dies at 74

This could be an exercise in prurience, but in actual fact, Mr. Whittington was a serious archivist of things pornographic. Employed by the Library of Congress for his entire professional career, Whittington cataloged such things as telephone books at work ("I was in charge of every phone book in the freaking world.") and developed a collection of more than 5,000 recordings of blues and doo-wop music in his spare time.

But porn was his passion, curatorially speaking. In a 2002 article in the Post, he explained his collection: “I have bawdy house coins from whorehouses in the 1860s,” he told gettingit.com. “One coin says, ‘10 cents for lookie, 25 cents for feelie, 50 cents for doie.’ 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. Mr. Whittington had a Betamax player, of course, but one piece of equipment he never owned was a computer. As a result, his expertise remained rooted in the era before magazines and videotapes gave way to the Internet."

Whittington sold most of his collection in 1999 to the Museum of Sex, but retained a few items that appealed to his sense of history. And while he had the collection, he had an amusing attitude towards the views of others, saying, “When people come here, at least I don’t bore them,” he said. “They may leave shaking their heads, but they’re not bored.”

Get to work, TR. I've found something that'll keep your mind off the pain.