Tony Fekete on Collecting Erotica

12/31/24 • 52 min

Tony Fekete is a book collector who for years specialized in collecting erotica. He's best known for the catalogue he produced for a Christie’s auction that took place in 2014 that featured highlights from his collection. More than 200 books, manuscripts, lithographs and erotic photographs went up for sale, including a first edition of My Secret Life (1888), an eleven-volume memoir that describes in detail the sex life of an anonymous Victorian "Gentleman," of which only twenty-five copies were printed. The auction netted Fekete more than a million pounds. Tony is a mobile bibliophile who travels frequently, primarily by train, in pursuit of books. Born in London in 1954 of Hungarian descent, he worked for Citibank in Eastern Europe during the mid-1980s where he cultivated both his love of books and an appreciation for the region. Today he shares these passions on Instagram and Facebook, posting photographs of his journeysthroughout Eastern Europe, that feature old bars and restaurants that he favours and, of course, highlights from his still significant (and stimulating) erotica collection. I spoke with him via Zoom.

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Siegfried Lukatis on Insel Bucherei, the iconic German book series

Siegfried Lokatis is a retired professor of book history, and former head of the University of Leipzig's Institute for Communication and Media Studies. He is the author of Book Covers of the GDR and is currently working on a history of the S. Fischer publishing house, due out in 2026. We met in Leipzig recently where Siegfried treated me to a tour of the Bibliotop's splendid Insel Bucherei book collection. Founded in 1912, the series now contains some 2,000 titles (and still counting according to Jonathan Landgrebe, head of Suhrkamp Verlag, the company that today produces the books). The series is iconic in Germany and in many ways its publishing history reflects the history of the country. The books are known for their beauty and the care with which they're produced. Qualities include: individual typographical design, exquisite illustration (notably from the thirties - stay tuned) and photography, and printing on wood-free, age-resistant paper, plus they're thread-stitched and bound in decorative cover paper. They served as the model for Allen Lane's King Penguin series. The Insel Bucherie series includes both well-known and little known texts from world literature as well as art history, non-fiction, poetry, and fairy tales, plus gift anthologies from Germany and around the globe. Subjects covered in my conversation with Siegfried include Rilke and copyright, the decision to publish established, versus contemporary works; Stephan Zweig and the Nazis, poisonous mushrooms, the rarest volume, the Allied bombing of Leipzig, censorship, the separation of East and West Germany, wartime profits, collecting, pornography and more.

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Andres M. Zervigon on Illustrated Magazines

I first came across Andrés Mario Zervigón’s (Cuban) name while researching a magazine that filled me with awe the first time I saw it.

AIZ, the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Workers Illustrated Magazine) is an illustrated, mass circulation German periodical that was published in Berlin during the 1920s and 1930s (in Prague after 1933). It contains some of the most emotionally charged imagery I’ve ever seen. The best work was by John Heartfield.

Zervigón is professor of the history of photography at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 2000 and concentrates his scholarship “on the interaction between photographs, film, and fine art." His first book, John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (University of Chicago Press, 2012), proposes that “photography’s sudden ubiquity in illustrated magazines, postcards, and posters produced an unsettling transformation of visual culture that artists felt compelled to address.”

Zervigón’s work, says the Rutger’s website, “generally focuses upon moments in history when these media [film, photography, fine art] prove inadequate to their presumed task of representing the visual.”

We start our conversation by unpacking this passage, and then move on to a short history of illustrated, mass circulation magazines, (including VU magazine), then to the life of John Heartfield, and finally to AIZ.

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