The things you can learn with a library card

...As part of the library’s mandate to collect life as it was lived, small teams of librarians were dispatched in the 1970s to Times Square pornography shops to scoop up representative samples of the latest erotica. Among the paperback titles in the collection: “Animal Urge,” “The 48-Hour Orgy,” “Beach Stud” and “All Day Sucker.”

“The bookstore owners hated it when we showed up,” said Christopher Filstrup, a former librarian who was part of the shopping brigade. “But we loved it. Books and magazines were organized just the way librarians do it, by subject — fetish, S and M, black and white, that kind of thing. Since I was head of the Oriental Division my assignment was Asians.

“Oh, I did chubby, too.”

     -from a New York Times article on the New York Public Library's erotica collections