Lamont Officials Take Playboy Out of the Closet

Reading it for the articles just got a little easier.

Playboy Magazine joined Time, Sports Illustrated and Esquire among the open periodical shelves of the Lamont Library Reference Room last month.

Lamont Library Head of Reference Amy M. Kautzman said Lamont's group of professional librarians made the decision after "looking over all the issues and rethinking the duties."

Previously, Playboy had been kept in a locked cabinet informally known as "The Closet."

"We keep two kinds of magazines in The Closet: ones we bind for posterity and ones that have a really high theft ratio," Kautzman said. Joining Playboy in The Closet, for example, were less racy fare such as National Geographic, WIRED and the New York Review of Books.

Explaining the decision to move the "magazine for men" to the open shelves, Kauztman said, "We realized that is was the only magazine we kept from the shelf that wasn't being bound. There's nothing in The Closet that doesn't have a duplicate on the shelf, and that's the primary reason we moved Playboy. It doesn't make sense to have just one magazine locked away and not the others."

While Kautzman said demand for the magazine was low and she knew of no incidents of theft, other library employees had a different story.

"At one point, the two most stolen titles were Playboy and Documents of the National Security Council--we called it the love and war collection," said a supervisor in Lamont's Government Documents section who asked to remain anonymous.

Since Playboy left The Closet, "We've been finding it lying around in all sorts of places. The best was a copy we found in the lower level, next to the men's room," the supervisor said.

Inter-library Loan Assistant Wilson Gray said Playboy readership was not limited to library patrons.

"There's a special men's room open only to staff and faculty, and we find them there too," Gray said.

Like all magazines Lamont does not keep for binding, Playboy goes to Orchard Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies John R. Stilgoe for his class V.E.S. 160: "Modernization in the Visual United States Environment, 1890-2035" when the library is finished with it.

"The final project for V.E.S. 160 is a large illustration book assignment, so I get the magazines because the students can't afford them," Stilgoe said. "[Playboy is] an important part of the visual realm. It provides a good indicator of how conservative we are compared to France and Germany."

Explaining that the library staff makes no value judgments, Kautzman said, "Our job is to always keep the material readable. Considering how many magazines this library owns, I'm sure there's something that would offend any ideology."

Yale and Princeton do not provide access to paper copies of Playboy, according to librarians at both campuses.