Retired LoC curator and amateur pornography archivist
The Washington Post profiles retired Library of Congress curator and amateur pornography archivist Ralph Whittington.
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.
Whittington recently sold his complete collection to the new Museum of Sex, which opens in New York next month. He "is thrilled. He figures this vindicates his 30 years of curatorial labor in the vineyards of smut. 'This should give me a little credibility,' he says."
