Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse Magazine, passed away on Wednesday. According to his obituary in the Gray Lady, the first promotional brochure with explicit examples of Penthouse was mistakenly sent to “clergymen, schoolgirls, old-age pensioners and wives of members of Parliament” due to an old mailing list.
The outcry was huge. And there was a $264 fine for mailing indecent materials. But all 120,000 copies of the first issue of Penthouse sold out in days, and Mr. Guccione, a struggling artist from New Jersey who had been knocking around Europe for more than a decade, was on his way to being a tycoon.
Filed under “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
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