[3] He had to leave his job and join the army for the Korean War two years later, and was assigned to Fort Myer, Va,[5] to work for the Public Information Office,[4] where he both edited the post newspaper and took wedding photos for base marriages.

Beginning with a manuscript given by Leofric, Bishop of Exeter,[6] to his cathedral in 1070 through to the outright pornographic work of the 1950s, An Unhurried View examines examples of English erotic literature in an interpretive and explanatory context.

He convinced the notable psychoanalyst Theodor Reik to write the introduction.The book sold more than 125,000 copies in hardback and over 200,000 in print, showing Ginzburg a large potential market for this kind of publication as well as his talents in the mailing business.

[11] However, Bobby Fischer himself hated the article and denied most of it, claiming that it was not even a remotely accurate representation of his actual statements or his life,[12][13] while Ralph Ginzburg destroyed all of the research materials that would have backed his interview.

After he finally saved enough money to rent his own office—a fifth-floor walk-up in an old Manhattan office building, Ginzburg published his first self-published book, 100 Years of Lynchings in 1962, a collection of newspaper accounts that directly exposed the history and the status quo of American racism.

The book was a sign that Ginzburg had wed his business to his interest in social activism,[1] and it was regularly adapted by African American studies as one of the primary pedagogical materials to show the harsh nature of pre-civil-rights race relations in America.

[4] During this period Ginzburg also published Liaison, a biweekly newsletter, and "The Housewife's Handbook on Selective Promiscuity" by Lillian Maxine Serett, writing as Rey Anthony.

The magazine cost him another famous lawsuit after he published a special issue claiming that Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate that year, was psychologically unfit for the office.

[7][21][22] According to Ginzburg, Eros was published as "the result of recent court decisions that have realistically interpreted America's obscenity law that has given this country a new breath of freedom of expression".

[23][22] Pushing and testing the boundaries of censorship after the case of Roth v. United States,[24] Ginzburg made the best of such freedom and devoted the magazine to "the joys of love and sex",[25] making Eros entertaining at the first glance.

[1] With his good taste of writing and editorial talents, Ginzburg presented a careful selection of articles in Eros, including works written by big-name authors like Guy de Maupassant and Allen Ginsberg, while giving out social activism messages such as liberation from excess repression, desacralising democratisation of art, race equality, anti-war and so on.

[29][30] Eros magazine is significant in American publishing history as it covered and helped to incite the sexual revolution, while it also contributed to the formation of counter-culture in the late 1960s.

The issue included short stories by Ray Bradbury and Guy de Maupassant, an extract from Eric Partridge's "vulgar dictionary" and poems by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester.

It featured photo essays about John F Kennedy, French prostitutes and erotic statues in India, the first publication in a magazine of Mark Twain's short story "1601" and "an antique patent submission for a male chastity belt".

[27] This issue published a letter by Allen Ginsberg, a profile of Frank Harris, and 'an eight-page "photographic tone poem"' titled "Black and White in Color", featuring a nude couple, but with no pubic parts shown, with an African-American man and a European-American girl.

Throughout the pages of each can be found constant repetition of patently offensive words used solely to convey debasing portrayals of natural and unnatural sexual experiences.

[36][37] Under such consideration and borrowing principles from the Roth case, the Supreme Court carefully assumed that "standing alone, the publications (Eros, Liaison and The Housewife's Handbook on Selective Promiscuity) themselves might not be obscene.

Ginzburg had sought mailing privileges from postmasters at Blue Ball and Intercourse, Pennsylvania, and the trial court found it obvious that "these hamlets were chosen only for the value their names would have in".

[22] Therefore, the court concluded that Ginzburg's methods of advertising and distributing were attempts to pander to prurient interests with no redeeming social advantages [20], and obscenity was found according to such motive.

[40] After the loss of his last plea to vacate his conviction (an appeals court earlier reduce his sentence from five to three), Ginzburg started his time in prison in 1972, and was released on parole eight months later,[16] probably thanks to the effort of his supporters including novelist Sloan Wilson.

[5] Ralph Ginzburg was quickly put up on charges and convicted partly because he was responsible for not only production (as editor), but also promotion and distribution (as publisher) for Eros, Liaison, and the Housewife's Handbook on Selective Promiscuity.

When there was no necessity to sort out the responsibility of different parties, any theory of the case could apply to him,[40] just as the Supreme Court has done by shifting focus from the publications themselves to the way Ginzburg promoted them and found him guilty eventually.

[1][2] Commenting on the case and Ginzburg's conviction, Arthur Miller had concluded in the late 1960s: After all the legal, moral and psychological arguments are done, the fact remains that a man is going to prison for publishing and advertising stuff a few years ago that today would hardly raise an eyebrow in your dentist's office.

If it is right that Ralph Ginzburg goes to jail, then in all justice the same court that sentenced him should proceed at once to close down ninety percent of the movies now playing and the newspapers that carry their advertising.

"[5][27]From January 1964 to August 1967, Ginzburg published a quarterly magazine named fact:, which could be characterized as a humorous, scathingly satiric journal of comment on current society and politics.

[48] Herbert F. Lubalin (1918–1981), a post-modern design guru, was Ginzburg's collaborator on his four best-known magazines, including Avant Garde, which in turn gave birth to a well-known typeface of the same name.