Enter Eros

The advance promotion promised to lay sex right on the line. "Eros is the magazine of sexual candor . . . devoted to love in its every manifestation . . . It will not be fig-leafed by censors." The price only added to the excitement: $10 per copy, $25 for a four-issue yearly subscription. This week, with the arrival of spring and the rutting season, the first 75,000 copies of Eros went to charter subscribers and on sale at bookstores. One quick trip through the newcomer's 80 pages should have been enough for even the basest appetite to discover that Eros is a four-letter word spelled "bore."

The magazine's nudes are reproductions of old masters--Bordone's Venus and Cupid, Manuel's The Judgment of Paris--and remarkably chaste: for the true voyeur, either Playboy (60-c-) or New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (admission free) houses far fleshier work. Some of Eros' articles are cribbed from history: De Maupassant's Madame Tellier's Brothel, which first wowed Parisians in 1881; poems by the Earl of Rochester (d. 1680), their mild eroticism heavily disguised in battered olde type. Votaries of contemporary vulgarity got their kicks mainly in the titles of Eros' assortment of original stuff. An article on "Erotomania," for example, turned out to be a scholarly study of lovesickness by Psychologist Theodor (Listening with the Third Ear) Reik.

Eros is the by-blow of Ralph Ginzburg, 32, a Brooklyn-born freelance writer who first discovered the marketability of the sex label during a tour with Esquire Magazine. Ginzburg wrote an article on erotica that Esquire paid him for but decided not to print--partly on the ground of dullness. Fired later by the magazine, he expanded his article into a book, An Unhurried View of Erotica, which, he claims, sold 125,000 copies in hard cover and 150,000 in paperback. This response to what was little more than a bibliography of erotic books encouraged him to give birth to Eros. Ginzburg claims he has enough material to keep Eros going for three years, some of it collected in forays on the New York Public Library. He may decide to return most of it.

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