Ralph Ginzburg

Ralph Ginzburg (October 28, 1929 – July 6, 2006) was an American editor, publisher, journalist, and photographer.

Ralph Ginzburg was born in Brooklyn on October 28, 1929, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents.

He went to New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn and was president of his class.

Since his parents hoped that he could be an accountant, when he first enrolled in City College of New York after high school, he majored in accounting.

While Ginzburg was taking a journalism class at CCNY, his professor, Irving Rosenthal, realised his talent in journalism and encouraged him to accept an editorial job on the school newspaper, The Ticker.

Ginzburg later became editor-in-chief of it, which further fostered his passion for journalism.

After graduating in 1949, Ginzburg found a job at The New York Daily Compass as a copy boy and cub reporter.

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

Meanwhile, he worked full-time at night as a copy editor for the Times-Herald in nearby Washington, DC.

One of his colleagues, an inquiring photographer for the newspaper, was Jackie Lee Bouvier (later Kennedy Onassis).

Following his discharge, Ginzburg worked briefly at NBC, then joined Look magazine as circulation promotion manager.

He also worked for Reader's Digest, Collier's, and, as he put it, "other pillars of communications industry respectability".

An article he wrote during his spare time, "An Unhurried View of Erotica", impressed Esquire's publisher Arnold Gingrich, and therefore he was offered a job as articles editor at Esquire.

During his times there, he expanded the article to a 20,000-word manuscript and published it as a book.

This rather scholarly seeming book explored an ostensible undercurrent of pornography that runs throughout English literature.

Beginning with a manuscript given by Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, 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.

The end of the book includes a bibliography of 100 titles.

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.

In August 1961, Ginzburg managed to conduct an extensive interview of 18-year-old Bobby Fischer.

Ginzburg said he got in touch with Fischer by simply giving Fischer's older sister Joan a call, and he "got along well" with Fischer.

He sold the interview, entitled "Portrait of a Genius As a Young Chess Master", to Harper's Magazine, which published it in January 1962.

The interview of the reclusive chess genius became one of the most famous interviews in history, especially among chess players, and has gained great popularity ever since, partly as the first public indication of Fischer's paranoia and critical behaviours.

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, while Ralph Ginzburg destroyed all of the research materials that would have backed his interview.

The interview made young Fischer furious and "created a distrust of reporters", and therefore it became practically the last formal interview Fischer ever gave, which ironically added to its popularity.

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, 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.

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.

Ginzburg's most famous publication, Eros, a high-priced magazine of classy erotica, was launched in 1962 too, and only four issues were published before he was indicted on charges of violating federal obscenity laws and had to stop publishing the quarterly.

He was found guilty by the Supreme Court eventually and sentenced to five years in prison.

(He was released after eight months.)

He was best known for publishing books and magazines on erotica and art and for his conviction in 1963 for violating federal obscenity laws.

Ginzburg's next publication was Fact, a political journal with a muckraking bent, published between January 1964 and August 1967.

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.

He lost the lawsuit again and had to pay $1 in compensatory damages and $75,000 in punitive damages to Senator Goldwater.

From 1968 to 1971, Ginzburg published Avant Garde, an art and culture magazine with graphic and logogram designed by Herb Lubalin, and the logo font of the magazine later gave birth to a well-known typeface of the same name.

In 1968, Ginzburg signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

Avant Garde focused on radical politics and stopped publication when Ginzburg started serving his sentence in 1972.

(He wrote "Castrated: My Eight Months in a Federal Prison" to describe his time in prison.) Although he tried to revive it as a tabloid newspaper with his wife after his release from prison, his attempt failed and the new Avant Garde lasted only one issue.

The failure to revive Avant Garde and the lost lawsuit drove Ginzburg to the brink of bankruptcy, but he was saved by the success of his next periodical, the biweekly consumer adviser Moneysworth, which meant to resemble Consumer Reports and presumably netted 2 to 3 million a year in rentals.

Apart from publishing and editing, Ginzburg continued to be an activist.