Plain Brown Wrapper

Plain Brown Wrapper was a mail-order-only men's fetish quarterly published out of a walk-up office on West 42nd Street in New York City from 1973 to 1979. It started life as Rick's Underground, a mimeographed zine stapled together on a card table in the back of a Times Square peep show, and evolved into something its creator never quite expected: a genuinely interesting, surprisingly well-photographed exploration of sexual fixation that people actually collected.

The man behind it was Rick Tedesco, a 31-year-old from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, who had been running a peep show booth operation on 42nd Street since 1970. Before that he'd done two years in Vietnam as a combat photographer's assistant, worked the docks in Red Hook, and drifted into Times Square because a guy he knew from the Army was managing a triple-X theater on Eighth Avenue and needed someone who could fix projectors. Rick could fix projectors. He could also fix cameras, build a darkroom in a closet, and talk to women without making them feel like they needed a shower afterward — a rare skill set on 42nd Street in 1970.

Each issue of PBW was built around a single theme — stockings, voyeur, tan lines, leather and lace, redheads, disco. Rick shot the photos himself on a Nikon F in his railroad apartment on West 46th Street, hired models from the Times Square circuit (peep show dancers, aspiring actresses, SVA art students, the occasional tourist), and paid well enough that they kept coming back. The subscription list peaked at about 4,200 names. Each subscriber got their quarterly issue in a plain manila envelope with no return address, mailed from a PO box in Times Square Station.

PBW folded in 1979. The peep show that had been Rick's day job was bought out by a chain, the 42nd Street cleanup was starting to gain political momentum, and the Jersey City printer retired. Rick took a job as a staff photographer at the Village Voice, where he spent the next fifteen years shooting punk shows, protest marches, and the occasional food feature. The filing cabinet of PBW negatives went with him to every apartment he lived in until he donated it to a private collector of underground erotica in 2019. Read more in our blog.