Barbara Bloom | Playboy, Vol. XLI, No. 1

Barbara Bloom

Playboy, Vol. XLI, No. 1 (Braille Edition)

New York City, USA: Self-published, 1994

[120] pp., 28.5 x 20.5 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 10 signed and numbered copies

Mack Mattingly was the first Republican from Georgia to serve in the U.S. Senate since the Reconstruction era, and the first Republican ever to have been elected to the Senate from Georgia by popular vote. He served a single term, from 1981 to 1987. 

During that time he became known for attempting to prevent the publication of Playboy magazine. Not the glossy, colour magazine with nude pictorials and a famous pull-out centrefold, but a lesser known version, for the blind. 

Since July of 1931, the Pratt-Smoot Act dictated that the Library of Congress would provide braille copies of publications with high circulation numbers. This included popular periodicals such as Good Housekeeping, Boy’s Life, National Geographic, Fortune, Better Homes & Gardens, and - eventually - Playboy. 

Playboy first began publishing in 1953, and seventeen years later was eligible for a braille edition, when its circulation was approaching seven million copies a month. It was the first “gentleman’s magazine” to be produced for the visually impaired. It went on to become the sixth most popular publication in the Library’s Braille magazine catalog. 

Printed on heavy stock paper and embossed on both sides, the magazine excluded advertisements, photographs and cartoons. The only ink appeared on the cover, reproducing the title, volume number and Art Paul’s iconic bunny logo. 

Mattingly viewed translating Playboy into braille - at a cost of just over a hundred thousand dollars a year - as a waste of congressional funds. He argued that the magazine promoted illicit sex and promiscuity and that the government should not be subsidizing pornography. This despite the fact that the braille version redacting anything visually pornographic. 

The magazine had a long history of publishing fiction by acclaimed novelists such as Margaret Atwood, Saul Bellow, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, Chuck Palahniuk, Gore Vidal and countless others. It also published sprawling long-form interviews with public figures such as artists, athletes, economists, composers, conductors, directors,  playwrights, and politicians. These included Muhammad Ali, Ingmar Bergman, Jimmy Carter, Eldridge Cleaver, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Marshall McLuhan, and Malcolm X, amongst others. 

The month after I turned eighteen, Playboy published an interview with John Cleese, which I purchased while bored and staying at my grandmother’s house, well aware of the irony of actually buying the magazine for it’s articles. 

A July 1985 vote in the House of Representatives, secured a 216-to-193 roll call win in favour of abolishing funding. To circumvent cries of censorship, the vote was listed as a reduction in the budget of the Library of Congress, in the exact amount of the price of Playboy’s braille translation. 

Ron Staley, a radio archivist at UCLA who was blind from birth told the Washington Post "He calls it budgeting, but I call it censorship. We, the blind, live under a partial de jure censorship anyway because certain things are just not available to us . . . We feel if Playboy went, it might even happen to other magazines. It seems to me that Playboy is being targeted. If [they] are so interested in cutting budgets, why isn't it across the board?" 

The American Council of the Blind, the Blinded Veterans Association, the American Library Association, joined Playboy Enterprises in a lawsuit calling the ban a violation of the First Amendment and asking for the ban to be overturned.

In an August 1986 ruling, federal district court judge Thomas Hogan agreed, calling the withholding of funds a “back door method” of censorship. The Braille edition resumed publication in January 1987. 

Barbara Bloom produced the above edition by ordering ten copies of the translated magazine and added only the slightest intervention - a return of the centrefold. Her choice called back to the first issue, in 1953, which featured Marilyn Monroe on the cover. Bloom’s centrefold addition featured the famous Eve Arnold impromptu image of Monroe in a bathing suit, reading James Joyce's Ulysses in a Long Island playground.

The movie star was reportedly reading the book in fits and starts - mirroring the way that it was written - and had pulled out a borrowed copy to read while Arnold was setting up her equipment. 

Bloom commented on how "sexy people look reading in libraries. And sad. And beautiful. And fleeting.”