The Coming of Beaver Street

Robert Rosen (left) with Headpress publisher David Kerekes in London, June 2009.

By Robert Rosen

Leo: The new moon on the 16th is the time to launch the new plans that you’ve been thinking about obsessively for far too long.

I don’t often read horoscopes, but the one above, by Katharine Merlin, astrologer for Town & Country magazine, spoke to me, and I listened. That’s why I’ve chosen today, November 16, 2009, to announce that my investigative memoir, Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography, will be published next year in the UK by Headpress.

Beaver Street is my first book since Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, which was published more than nine years ago. For those of you who’ve read it, you may recall the crucial role that the T&C horoscopes played in Lennon’s life.

Without going into too much detail about Beaver Street, let me just say that it’s based on diaries I kept while working in porn for 16 years as an editor for magazines like Swank, Stag, High Society, and D-Cup, as well as on extensive research, and that I define “modern pornography” as the fusion of erotica and computers. This first occurred at High Society in 1982 with the advent of “free” phone sex.

In Beaver Street, I explore the hidden nexus where cutting-edge technology meets raw sex, generating vast fortunes for the largely anonymous men who run America’s “adult entertainment” empires. It’s kind of a Tropic of Capricorn for the digital age, as well as a serious history that reads like a comic novel. If you’ve read Nowhere Man, then you’ll have some idea of what I mean.

I’ll be posting more information here as it becomes available. But if you’d like to get more of a sense of the book’s flavor, you can read an interview I did in 2003, when I was in the middle of writing it.

I do want to extend a heartfelt thanks to everybody who’s read Nowhere Man and has expressed an interest in this long-awaited “next book.” Though the subject may be very different, I feel confident that if you enjoyed Nowhere Man you’ll enjoy Beaver Street.

For now I’m going to celebrate with a cup of British tea.