Eric Kroll’s Erotica Collection
In the late 1990s when eBay was still fun, before Meg Whitman decided to root out all the smut, I spent a lot of money on there buying old porn magazines by the boxload. For a brief golden hour (actually, a couple of years) the supply of old smut coming out of musty attics overwhelmed the budgets of collector-hoarders like me.
In order to support my buying habit, I took to selling stuff, just like so many other eBay-enabled collectors in that era. And one of the things I sold was erotic postcards. At that time these were often published in bound “postcard books” with one perforated edge, by Taschen and some Japanese publishers and many other mostly-overseas sources. I would buy them in via Amazon (which process required some knowledge or some willingness to gamble, because this was before most items on Amazon had good photos of anything except the book covers, which were always much tamer than the postcards inside), split the postcards out of the book (carefully trimming the perforated edge), and sell the postcards individually for $2-$5 each. And they would sell! Lord how they would sell.
Among my consistent best-sellers were postcards from a book by Eric Kroll, fetish photographer. The woman smoking with her feet at the top of this post was a crowd favorite. And that is how I learned who Eric Kroll was.
Fast forward 20 years and I see a Tweet from fetish photographer Dave Naz. It seems that Kroll is now retired and living in a house he can’t quite afford that’s jammed full of erotic art (his own and stuff he has collected). So there’s a fundraising campaign to help him keep things together until he can find an institution to take the collection. I’m a sucker for a good collection of erotic art, and since I made a little money off his work back in the day, it seems like the least I can do is share the appeal with this audience; the GoFundMe link is in Naz’s tweet.
There are some Eric Kroll prizes for generous donors, but of course that’s not really the point.
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Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=16855
Contact me privately. I have some mags you may be interested in.
Thanks, Piratestan. But I’m not in a collecting mode now — for family reasons I’m living long-term-temporary in a place where I simply don’t have sufficient storage to acquire anything.
I have to say that when I look at that picture I have to imagine the conversation that preceded it: “Take a drag off a cigarette between my toes…? Well, yeah, I *guess* I could do that…”
I have to imagine that a significant fraction of the skillset required to be a good fetish photographer is communicating what you want to the models without scaring them away.
Clever photographers, cinematographers, directors, producers, casting directors and the like will often ask potential models, actors, extras, etc. if they have any special skills or talents, because of the potential to add a bit of interest to their work. This model may have answered the question with, “Well, I can get my ankles behind my head…”, and the photographer came up with the cigarette idea from that. Or, he may have heard rumors about her unusual talent. Otherwise, he would have likely had to run through quite a number of gals before finding one that could get her foot to her lips…
I have a large collection of erotica that includes books magazines VHS tapes 8mm films some date back to the 1940’s. I’m looking for a buyer and collector who would be interested. Please contact via email.
Thank You.
David, I’m not in collecting mode these days (no storage or funds) and your email doesn’t show to anybody but me. But if you want to post publicly visible contact information (at your own risk) I don’t mind.