Marc Weingarten wrote a nice summary of Ralph Ginzberg's life on his blog, Two Jakes.
Ralph Ginzberg died last week. Ralph Ginzberg was a brave and courageous hustler, a man for whom the big score was worth sacrificing your livelihood for. He was a street smart striver who talked in the clipped Brooklyn patios of a Coney Island barker. Working his way though the advertising department at the old Look magazine in the 50's, he became a high-level exec in short order. But when he thought it might be a good idea to trawl libraries for obscure erotica and then publish it in book from, the shit really hit the fan. Ginzberg published An Unhurried View of Erotica while working as an editor at Esquire magazine. The book was a sensation; Mike Wallace had Ginzberg on his old NightBeat talk show, and the book wound up selling over 300,000 copies.
That wasn't a good move, as it turned out, as Ginzberg appeared on the Wallace show against the wishes of his boss, Esquire publisher Arnold Gingrich. So Ginzberg was fired from Esquire, but he didn't stop there.
