Something new in the archive: Plain Brown Wrapper, a 1970s NYC mail-order underground quarterly from a man named Rick Tedesco. It's the first color magazine in the collection, the first mail-order-only title, and the first one that came from Manhattan instead of a regional outpost. Vol. 2, No. 1 from Spring 1975 is the rebrand issue — the first one under the new name, after four mimeographed issues as Rick's Underground that he printed on a card table in the back of a Times Square peep show.
Rick is 31, from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and he's been running a peep show booth operation on West 42nd Street since 1970. Before that: two years in Vietnam as a combat photographer's assistant, six months on the Red Hook docks, and a drift into Times Square because a guy he knew from the Army needed a projector fixer. He could fix the projectors. He could also fix the cameras, build a darkroom in a closet, and — per his own telling — talk to women without making them feel like they needed a shower afterward. Rare skill set on 42nd Street in 1970.
He started shooting 8mm peep show loops in 1972, found he had an eye for composition (stockings wrinkled at the ankle, venetian blind shadows across a hip), and in late 1973 scraped together $800 to mimeograph 200 copies of Rick's Underground. Sold out in three weeks. Printed 200 more. Sold those too. By early 1975, he'd outgrown the mimeograph, found a Jersey City printer named Sal who could do color separation for a price he could almost afford, and renamed the magazine Plain Brown Wrapper. The subtitle on the cover for the first four issues: "formerly Rick's Underground" — because half his subscription list knew him by the old name and he didn't want them thinking someone else had taken over.
Every PBW issue is built around a single theme. Rick writes a 2-page editorial essay called "The Focus" where he mixes personal anecdote with pseudo-intellectual justification for whatever fixation the issue is about. Spring 1975 is legs and stockings — "the most democratic fetish there is," he writes. "You don't have to explain it. Every man gets it. Your grandfather got it. Your mailman gets it. The guy who drives the crosstown bus gets it."
The essay opens with him watching his Aunt Rosalie's stocking seam running up the back of her calf at a Thanksgiving dinner in Bensonhurst when he was fourteen. "She was carrying a casserole dish from the kitchen to the dining room table and I watched that dark line travel from her ankle to the back of her knee and disappear under her skirt and something in my brain went click."
The cover girl is Lorraine "Lorrie" Moretti, 28, from Ozone Park, Queens. She's the dressing room attendant at the Melody Burlesque on West 48th Street — the girl who hands out the costumes, threads the stockings up the dancers' legs, and collects the tip split at the end of the shift. Rick met her a year ago when a dancer ripped a stocking five minutes before her set and Lorrie got her onstage with thirty seconds to spare. "The hands knew what they were doing," he writes. Her spread is in a cheap Times Square hotel room, with a centerfold pullout where she reclines across the floral bedspread in black stockings and heels. It's the first centerfold in the archive.
Karen Jansen, 25, is the second girl — an ER nurse at Roosevelt Hospital on West 59th Street who studies nights at Hunter toward a BSN. Rick met her when he ran out of stop bath in his bathroom darkroom at 11 PM and walked to the Roosevelt emergency room to beg for acetic acid. Karen found him some from a first-aid kit and asked what he did. He showed her the magazine. She asked if he shot real women. He said he tried to. She said, "I'm a real woman. So shoot me." Her spread is in Rick's railroad apartment on West 46th in white stockings and an afternoon light so warm it looks borrowed from a different decade.
Nikki Vasquez, 26, plays guitar in a band called The Cold Ones — they've been on the CBGB/Max's circuit for eighteen months, have nine songs, and have played to active boos three times. Rick saw her at CBGB on a Tuesday night and wrote down her name. The Rick check for the shoot pays off the last three months of the layaway on her 1971 Les Paul Standard at Manny's on 48th Street. Her spread is in a borrowed SoHo loft — exposed brick, paint-splattered floor, fishnet stockings, red garter belt, an oversized men's button-down she says belongs to her ex-boyfriend.
On the Square is a 2-page spread with four women Rick found around Times Square — a peep show dancer, an all-night diner waitress, an actress between auditions, an SVA art student. Each gets a photo and a short blurb, with a mail-order pitch to buy their explicit photo sets (Set A / Set B / Both). From the Booth is Rick's half-page review of The Devil in Miss Jones at the Rialto on 42nd Street — he praises Georgina Spelvin's face, complains about the sound, and calls it three out of five. "Bring your own hot dog."
Reader Mail includes a guy in Tulsa complaining about a cold model in the previous issue (Rick: "that was December and my radiator was broken"), a German subscriber in Düsseldorf trying to pay in Deutsche Marks, and a reader named Marvin in Baltimore who'd been begging for an all-stockings issue for a year. Rick's response to Marvin: "Marvin, you're in luck. Look at what you're holding. Buy your ten copies and send five to your friends."
This copy was stored in a manila envelope in a filing cabinet in Rick's apartment (per the collector who acquired the archive in 2019) and is in remarkably good shape. The cover has a slight yellowing at the corners. The staples are intact. The centerfold fold crease is visible but not cracked. The Kodachrome reproduction has held up better than any of the regional magazines in the collection, because PBW was printed on heavier coated stock from day one of the rebrand.
Scanned on a consumer flatbed at approximately 150 DPI equivalent. Color and slight aging preserved.