![]() Never one to back down from a First Amendment challenge, Penthouse found itself under siege yet again in 1990 this time, by the American Family Association, a Christian group which planned to picket 400 Waldenbooks and K-Mart stores for carrying Penthouse and Playboy. To recoup profits, Guccione's team experimented with a range of strategies, including a cover story on celibacy as "the new hot lifestyle." It also launched headlong into three new ventures in the 1980s, including Spin, a music magazine to be run by Bob Guccione, Jr., New Look, which survived less than six months, and the unexpected Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defense Technology, which targeted defense industry personnel. Playboy's numbers were also steadily declining, but remained slightly higher than those of Penthouse. That same year, the magazine actually lost money for the first time in its history. By 1987, the numbers had fallen to 3 million by 1995, circulation was just over the one million mark. Overall, Penthouse witnessed a steady decline in circulation and never recovered its 1979 high of 4.7 million. "People are simply reading less," noted Guccione. Penthouse's constant legal battles throughout the 1980s and 1990s cost it millions of dollars in annual litigation fees, but the magazine had another, more threatening problem: videocassette distributors, who now boasted that some ten percent of their sales were in the category of erotica. Although a Federal District Court eventually forced the Commission to retract its letter, it denied the plaintiffs financial relief in a strange footnote, Edwin Meese was later reported to have said that he did not consider either Playboy or Penthouse to be obscene. Penthouse retaliated, along with Playboy and the American Booksellers Association, by filing a suit against the Commission, charging it with violating the First Amendment. By the end of the campaign, some 20,000 retail and convenience stores had been dissuaded from carrying the adult titles. Bowing to the pressure, Southland Corporation, parent company of 7-11 convenience stores, announced that it would no longer sell either Penthouse or Playboy in its 4,500 outlets. Sending its warning on Justice Department stationary, the Commission advised several large booksellers and retail chains that they would be named. One of the more damaging campaigns came in 1986 when Attorney General Edwin Meese and an 11-member Commission on Pornography sought to intimidate retailers by publishing a blacklist of pornography distributors. Throughout the Reagan era, Penthouse was ravaged by attacks from Christian right-wing conservative groups such as the National Federation for Decency. Guccione's enterprise was anything but smooth sailing during the 1980s. Working from the nine-story mansion he shared with Keeton on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Guccione became known for his gold chains and lavish lifestyle. ![]() Although Penthouse (a subsidiary of General Media Publishing) continued to grow and diversify over the next three decades, the company remained privately owned by Guccione and his companion, Kathy Keeton, whose operation was something of a Mom-and-Pop arrangement, staffed by several members of Guccione's family. In 1969, the magazine was moved to the United States, where it expanded into a publishing dynasty that included Forum (1975), Penthouse Letters (1981), and several non-erotic ventures, such as Omni, a consumer science magazine (1978), Compute (1979), and Longevity (1989). ![]() In 1965, Guccione launched the London-based Penthouse, with slightly racier pictorials as well as investigative stories. Following the 1953 debut of Hugh Hefner's erotic magazine, Bob Guccione rightly sensed that men might prefer to see a bit "more flesh" than was being offered by Playboy. Penthouse, "the international magazine for men," became a household name along with its number one competitor, Playboy, during the 1960s and 1970s era of "free love" and sexual revolution.
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