The Washington Post reports on a retired LC librarian whose porn collection
is going to the new Museum of Sex. Full article at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55204-2002Aug23.html.
" For 36 years -- until his retirement in 2000 -- Whittington worked at the
Library of Congress. He started out fetching books and ended up as curator
of the Main Reading Room. Along the way, he was given the responsibility of
overseeing the library's collection of phone books.
"I was in charge of every phone book in the freaking world," he says.
Working with phone books, he learned how to organize, catalogue and
archive a collection. And he took those skills home, where he was building a
couple of archives of his own. The first was a collection of R&B and doo-wop
music, which now includes 5,000 records. The second was pornography.
Whittington started collecting smut just for his own, um, edification. But
then, in the early '70s, he had an epiphany: The Library of Congress was
collecting nearly every variety of printed matter -- even phone books, for
crying out loud! -- but not porn. Apparently, it was up to him to preserve
the X-rated aspects of America's glorious heritage.
"All I did was use the same techniques that archivists use for other
subjects on this subject," he says. "I hope you'll convey to your readers
that I'm serious about this. This isn't brain surgery, but I'm not just a
guy with a lot of big-breast magazines."
Jenny Tobias
Museum of Modern Art Library
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