INTRODUCTION
Madonna – born in Bay City, Michigan in 1958 as Madonna Louise Ciccone – is one of the most successful American music icons, recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the fourth-best-selling recording artist of all time and as the top-ranking woman among recording artists. After her debut album Madonna in 1983, she rose to fame with her album Like a Virgin in 1984. Since then, Madonna has sustained over three decades of popular cultural impact across music, fashion, television, film, literature, the visual arts, the beauty and health industries, business, and philanthropy, among other areas. In many respects, Madonna has become synonymous with American popular culture in the later decades of the twentieth century and onward, including the construction of American national narratives – whether real or imagined – of freedom, individualism, and self-expression, especially sexual self-expression, and not just nationally but also globally, given the reach of her fame.
Among this considerable output, her first published book Sex (1992) – largely a collection of sexually explicit photos mostly of Madonna, with an accompanying narrative of her sexual fantasies – merits scholarly attention, in part for the publishing milestones it has achieved. Madonna has authored or coauthored thirty books, including nineteen children's books and eleven coffee-table-type books, with Sex among the latter. Sex was published on 21 October 1992, becoming the biggest international launch of a book ever.Footnote 1 Some 750,000 copies went on sale simultaneously in France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, and the US.Footnote 2 Sex is also the world's largest-grossing illustrated book, with 1,400,000 copies sold worldwide in six months through eight printings and five language editions: English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish.Footnote 3 With a list price of US$50.00 upon release, the book generated US$50 million in sales at retail in the US, and about US$20 million in sales at retail in the rest of the world (roughly equivalent to US$50.00 list price upon release), making a total world sales figure of approximately US$70 million.Footnote 4 About 1 million copies were sold in the US, with the remaining 400,000 sold throughout the world.Footnote 5 The US copies sold out by the end of 1992, in one printing. Nearly all of the English- and other-language editions sold out immediately; some of the editions in the latter group, such as the French and Japanese editions, went through multiple printings and took several months to sell out.Footnote 6 Now classified as a rare book, Sex is among the most actively traded rare books online, with mint copies of the book in the original sealed Mylar envelope attracting as much as a thousand dollars a copy.Footnote 7 According to BookFinder, Sex has been the most requested out-of-print book in nearly every year since 2003, the earliest available annual report on their website.Footnote 8
Sex attracted considerable cultural and media attention, with critics referring to the book as the “Sex Event” to signal its cultural impact.Footnote 9 Scholarly work on Sex reflects the scholarship on Madonna's work more widely.Footnote 10 This criticism can be divided into two broad perspectives. The first considers the artist and her work as promoting liberation – personal, sexual, gender, religious, national, ethnic, racial, and otherwise. Madonna and her work promote this liberation by embodying generative postmodern qualities of hybrid, pastiche identities and by building coalitions across diverse groups – such as genders and sexualities – in order to resist, decenter, and disrupt norms, such as patriarchy and heteronormativity.Footnote 11 Second, scholars have cautioned against overestimating the artist's and her work's liberatory and subversive possibilities.Footnote 12 Focussing specifically on Sex, reviews have marked it as a feat of creativity and self-expression, but also as anticlimactic, in that its contents – with potential for transgression, progressiveness, and more – did not live up to the media hype it manufactured and commanded.Footnote 13
SEX, AMERICA, AND THE DISCIPLINE OF BIBLIOGRAPHY
Over twenty-five years since the publication of Sex, how can we consider the book with this advantage of historical distance? One such advantage includes examining the book itself, the text at the center of the media attention that it and its author generated. Among the methodological and theoretical apparatus that can shed insight into the physical book is the scholarly discipline of bibliography, particularly as no study has examined in detail the physical construction of Sex, let alone using the methods of bibliography. As a framework for bibliography, it might be useful to begin with Michael Suarez's assertion that authors do not write books, they write manuscripts, and that a community of people – printers, editors, binders, publishers, designers – transforms that manuscript into a book.Footnote 14 Studying that transformation is one aspect of the work of bibliography. The field of bibliography can be divided into two broad categories, enumerative (or systematic) bibliography and analytical (or critical) bibliography. Enumerative bibliography is “the listing of books according to some system or reference plan,”Footnote 15 such as subject, author, or date, and seeks only to make a list or record of books, rather than describing them in depth; enumerative bibliographies are what we see at the end of articles and books. Analytical (or critical) bibliography is “the study of books as physical objects; the details of their production, the effects of the method of manufacture on the text.”Footnote 16 Analytical bibliography can be divided into three components: historical, textual, and descriptive. Historical bibliography is the history of books, which includes “the persons, institutions, and machines that produced them.”Footnote 17 Book history can include analyzing the historical, social, and economic contexts that shaped books, or, in one critic's formulation, “the social and cultural history of communication by print.”Footnote 18 Textual bibliography (or textual criticism) is “the relationship between the printed text as we have it before us, and that text as conceived by its author.”Footnote 19 Textual bibliography attempts to restore a text to its most authentic and original form, as when the author's original manuscript is missing and only later copies (or manuscripts) of the original manuscript exist (for example, the Greek New Testament, classical literature such as Homer's Iliad, and Shakespeare's plays). Descriptive bibliography is “the close physical description of books,”Footnote 20 which can include describing the paper, typeface, illustrations, and binding of books. These distinctions among historical, textual, and descriptive bibliography are somewhat artificial, as all of these categories necessarily overlap, reflecting the multifaceted lives of books and their contexts. Books are thus composite products, with their inanimate physical features serving as the records and expressions of the animation of human decisions and human agency. To recover and study the book is thus to study human agency, unpacking the traces of motivation and influence.
Within the discipline of bibliography, I will analyze Sex primarily through analytical bibliography and book history (historical bibliography), given the intersections of these two methods and the rich interdisciplinarity of the book itself. I draw upon the methods of D. F. McKenzie, who links bibliography with literary criticism in his seminal book Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. McKenzie argues that bibliography includes the study of “the composition, formal design, and transmission of texts by writers, printers, and publishers; their distribution through different communities by wholesalers, retailers, and teachers; their collection and classification by librarians; their meaning for, and – I must add – their creative regeneration by, readers.”Footnote 21 For McKenzie, bibliographic study can also include that of “texts as recorded forms, and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception.”Footnote 22 With an artist as famous as Madonna, the creative regeneration of her work, including Sex, is well known, regenerated by fellow recording artists, the wider public, and even Madonna herself, adding to and constituting her influence on popular American culture.Footnote 23
My use of the word “construction” in the title of this article signals not only the physical construction of Sex, but also the social and cultural ideas that constructed the book, and which the book in turn constructed, including about gender, sexuality, freedom of expression, religion, and the notion of “America” itself. As I stated in the opening paragraph of this article, Madonna and her work embody American national narratives about freedom, individuality, and self-expression, each of which informs notions of sexuality. Sex reinforces these narratives and links them with the idea of America, throughout the US and the world. This raises the question: what is the relationship between constructs of Americanness and bibliography, which includes book history? The Great Depression provoked introspection in the US about what constitutes American culture, with the interdisciplinarity of the pioneering work of Vernon Louis Parrington in American studies in the late 1920s reflecting the multifacetedness of national introspection.Footnote 24 Bibliography gives insight into the constructs and values of a national culture, with print culture providing a physical correlative of and springboard to the social, cultural, ideological, and institutional narratives and mores that shape a nation.
Book history or the history of the book (or books) is known in France as histoire du livre and in Germany as Geschichte des Buchwesens. This field of study is as old as at least the Renaissance in Western Europe, growing especially in nineteenth-century England as analytical bibliography studied books as material objects, including rare books and fine editions.Footnote 25 The current form of book history emerged in France in the 1960s and examines the book as “a force in history.”Footnote 26 This includes studying the socioeconomic influences on books, patterns across time in book production and consumption, and the workings of ideology by giving attention to previously understudied genres, such as bibliothèque bleue (primitive paperbacks), to “discover the literary experience of ordinary readers.”Footnote 27 This book history spread to Germany, the UK, and the US, inspiring national reflections and becoming an established field of study by the late 1970s. It is in this milieu of intellectual history that the Centre for the Book at the Library of Congress was established in 1977 (and influenced as well by American efforts at cultural diplomacy during the Cold War, a point I pursue in the conclusion). In the spirit of tracing the literary experience of ordinary readers, this article argues for the impact of Sex by showing how it can be situated within the cultural and scholarly context of American book history.
Analyzing the physical book that is Sex, including the book's production, distribution, and reception, one discerns the literal, physical record correlating to the creation of Madonna's (and America's) fame, in particular her (and America's) iconicity. Invoking this element of Madonna's iconicity, Michael Broek has argued that the combination of female sexual transgression, violence, and religion in Madonna's work can be viewed within an American ethos and historical context stretching back to Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Marble Faun (1860).Footnote 28 According to Broek, what is distinctive about the musical artists and the novel is their use of visuality, the “centrality of the image” which allows for a “realignment of perceptions.”Footnote 29 He argues that Madonna's popularity was propelled by her groundbreaking use of the music video, with MTV “critical to shaping her image,” and each video serving “to highlight the images and icons that provide a narrative backdrop for the song's lyrics.”Footnote 30 In a recent article analyzing Madonna's work from 1983 to 2006, José I. Prieto-Arranz also argues for the centrality of the visual image to Madonna's fame, while making a passing reference to Sex.Footnote 31 While agreeing with Broek's and Prieto-Arranz's arguments, I depart from this criticism to focus on the processes surrounding the visual images; that is, the process of production leading to and accompanying the visuality, and the process of distribution which also shapes and controls access to that visuality, and thus to the star, especially since iconicity is so central to the “identity” of Madonna. And Sex offers not just visuality per se, but a particular kind of visuality, a sexual one. If heterosexual pornography for men is largely marked by patriarchal domination (whether reinforced by men or by women) throughout the processes of production, distribution, and consumption, then Madonna has somewhat disrupted this process, especially through her degree of control at the stage of production. Madonna exploits the selling-value of sex and pornography, but the bibliographic facts of Sex demonstrate that its protagonist model, the author herself, is not disempowered but in fact very much in control. This essay thus extends the academic scholarship from the artist's songs and music videos (including about the visuality of the song and videos) to the printed book.
What is striking about Sex is its visuality. Among the book's 132 pages, 101 contain photographs, ninety-one of them of Madonna, eighty of them showing her face. At that point in her career, the book was unique as the first and thus largest self-authored collection of her photos, accompanied by a sustained narrative.Footnote 32 Labels that are frequently applied to Madonna include pop culture icon, music icon, and sexual icon. The word “icon” in these phrases contains at least two main meanings. Within semiotics or the scientific study of signs, it can refer to a signifier bearing a visual resemblance to its meaning or signified (e.g. a photograph, an emoticon). Within the social domain, icon can refer to a person of social significance (e.g. “pop culture icon”).Footnote 33 This article substantiates and extends Brian McNair's assertion that “Sex is a cultural phenomenon of global proportions and thanks to this Madonna established her iconic status and cultural influence.”Footnote 34 In Sex, Madonna unabashedly and uniquely iconizes herself. The book's uniqueness – which includes its unconventional content, its innovative design, the author's close control of production and even distribution – is constituted in part by its lack of historical precedence, with a production and object like Sex unprecedented either in Madonna's career or in the recording-music industry. Within the literal book and among the book as a media event, the two main meanings of icon – semiotic and social – reinforce and amplify each other, one icon iconizing the other. This dynamic movement to and from the literal page, the star creating photographs and the photographs creating the star, constituted and multiplied Madonna's fame, whether through negative or positive publicity. In a 1992 interview, her longtime publicist Liz Rosenberg stated that Madonna would welcome even hate over apathy.Footnote 35 I will begin with a description of Sex using the conventions of descriptive bibliography, and will then situate Sex within its British and international distribution and reception, highlighting all the while the significant control of the book's author.
EXAMINING SEX USING DESCRIPTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
I begin with a bibliographic description of the physical object that is Sex in order to show the book's creativity and technological complexity, and, more so, to demonstrate the influence and control of Madonna. On 20 April 1992, Madonna and Time Warner finalized a deal that gave Madonna her own record label, Maverick Records, and a two-book deal with Warner Books, as part of the Maverick entertainment company, which included Maverick Records, Maverick Films, Maverick Musica, book and music publishing, and a television production company.Footnote 36 Madonna stated, “Maverick stands for the perfect marriage of art and commerce.”Footnote 37 Warner Books gave Madonna an advance of US$5.5 million dollars for Sex, including US$500,000 for expenses.Footnote 38 The advance also included a sequel.Footnote 39 Five hundred thousand copies were shipped within the US by Warner Books, with armed guards taking the copies to the mail room and Warner Books requiring distributors to sign an affidavit that they would not deliver the books until 21 October.Footnote 40 The president of Warner Books, Laurence J. Kirshbaum, stated that such disciplined distribution was “following the same drill we used with Scarlett,”Footnote 41 the best-selling sequel to Gone with the Wind, which Warner Books published in the fall of 1991. On 8 November 1992, Sex entered the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list at number one.Footnote 42
I have examined the English-language edition of the book with reference to the copy at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University (shelfmark Phi c.64). In descriptive bibliography, the term “leaf” refers to the physical sheets of paper comprising a book, each face of the leaf colloquially called a page. The recto side is the upright side of the page, indicated by “r”; verso is the turned away side, indicated by “v.” Square brackets enclosing a number, at times followed by “r” or “v” for greater specificity, are the convention for referring to leaves, e.g. [1r] refers to the recto (r) or upright side of the first leaf. Sex has sixty-six leaves, unnumbered. Each leaf measures 350 by 272 millimeters. The first and last leaves, [1] and [66] respectively, are made of heavy neutral brown-coloured cardboard paper. The remaining leaves, except the four leaves of the inserted comic book (to be discussed later), are made of approximately 110 gsm paper. The paper was manufactured by Mohawk Press Mills, Inc.Footnote 43 The paper used for Sex is Mohawk Superfine Eggshell, one of the highest-quality papers.Footnote 44 It is unclear whether the paper was specially treated to take the photographs in the book. Madonna hired the then art director of Harper's Bazaar, Fabien Baron, to design Sex. Determined that form would lead content, Baron stated, “One hundred twenty-eight pages featuring same subject, same person, and each page she's nude! It's hard. What do you do with it?”Footnote 45
The bibliographic facts reveal how form indeed intersected with content. Some 101 pages of Sex’s 132 pages contain photographs. The colour of the photographs varies widely with regard to tone, saturation, and opacity. The colours which appear include black and white (e.g. [4r]), pink-beige (e.g. [18v], [55v]), blue (e.g. [19r]), pink (e.g. [22r]), green (e.g. [22v]), a quadratone negative colour separation ([23v], [51r]), a dualtone (orange and yellow) separation ([47r]), orange (e.g. [27v], [56v]), turquoise (e.g. [28v]), purple (e.g. [29r], [57r]), brown (e.g. [45v]), and cyan (e.g. [49r]). Some pages contain only one photograph, others contain up to thirty-six [31v], while [59v] and [60r] together contain seventy-four photographs. Of the 101 pages that show photographs, only ten, or 9.90 percent, do not depict the author. Furthermore, of the ninety-one pages of photographs in which the author does appear, only eleven of these (12.09 percent) do not show her face. In three of the photographs – [28r], [37v], [39r] – the author is looking in a mirror while she appears to masturbate. In almost all of the photographs featuring the author, the author is the principal subject, with the other figures existing almost as props. Men appear especially secondary in the photographs. Among 101 pages of photographs, there is only one photograph of a penis [30r], which is not erect.
The appearance of the type also varies. In terms of justification, on some pages the text is centered – [8v], [27r] [24r], [27r], [43r], [61v] – on others it is left-margin justified – [20r] – and elsewhere it is both left- and right-margin justified – [56r]. On [28v] the text is in two columns, each column right-margin justified. The colour of the type ranges from the traditional black (e.g. [8v]) to red ([35v]). On [43r] two shades of purple and a white type are superimposed by a black type. On [24r] each word appears in both red and blue, with the red distinguished through italicization, but the unity of each letter is preserved by keeping flush the baseline serifs of each red and blue variant. On other pages the letters of a single word are superimposed over one another, as in [51v] and [66v], with varying opacity. Pages [29v] and [52r] are unique in that they showcase type which is a variation on Helvetica with jagged-edged letters. Moreover, these words are cut out and pasted together creating a scrapbook-like effect (even “tape” connecting them is simulated). On some pages the text meanders around a photograph – [9v], [11v], [12v], [59v], [60r] – while on other pages the text is centered on the page, surrounded by photographs – [32r], [34v]. On [38r] the type decreases in size from the top to the bottom of the page. Other pages also include different-sized fonts, arranged in a traditional paragraph lineation – [46v], [47r].
The front and back covers of Sex are made of brushed aluminum. Each metal sheet measures 350 by 278 millimeters, with the two sheets connected by a metallic spiral. The metallic spiral binding of the book precludes a formula indicating format and collation; the book was bound by Nicholstone.Footnote 46 The book weighs approximately three pounds (1.36 kilograms). There are eight discernible types in the text. Three are facsimiles of apparently the author's handwriting, two in cursive script, the other in roman. The roman type appears on [9v], [12v], [17r], [18r], [20v]. Among the cursive scripts, one has the appearance of “natural” handwriting, while the other seems stylized, even contrived. The “natural” handwriting type appears in letters that the author composes to “Johnny” – [26r], [35v], [40r], [50v], [57v], [60v]. The more stylized, contrived type appears on [11v], [15r], [28v], [32r], [34v], [54v], [55r], [59v], [60r], [61r].
The five other types are Bauer Bodoni (of the Didone variety with vertical stress, east–west due strokes, and hairline serifsFootnote 47), Courier, Edel Grotesque Light (which is lineale or sans serif), Helvetica, and Palatino.Footnote 48 The Bauer Bodoni type appears on [3r], [8v], [20r], [21v], [23r], [24r], [27r], [38r], [41v], [43r], [46v], [47r], [48r], [51v], [56r], [61v], [66v]. The Courier type appears on [14r] and every page of the comic book, [62r] to [65v]. The Edel Grotesque Light appears on [1v]. The Helvetica type appears on [1r], [28v]. The Palatino type appears on [3v].
The book also contains a compact disc (CD), entitled “Erotic,” with all of the letters of the title appearing in uppercase and in black Edel Grotesque Light type. The words are centered and superimposed over a figure consisting of an “X” enclosed by two bracket-shaped lines: (X). This figure is rendered in a yellowish-green hue. The CD features one track, entitled “Erotic,” which has a running time of 05:18. The CD is enclosed in a sealable, shiny, silver-coloured Mylar bag measuring 152 by 155 millimeters. Inserted between the last and penultimate leaves of the book is a four-leaf comic book. At approximately 90 or 95 gsm, the paper constituting these leaves is lighter in weight than the paper used for the rest of the book. Each leaf of the comic book measures 330 by 225 millimeters. The comic book is entitled “Dita in the Chelsea Girl,” words which appear in a type unidentifiable in standard type manuals but recognizable as consistent with the type of conventional comic books. The comic book features black-and-white photographs of five characters, including the author of the book proper as the protagonist. The background colours throughout the comic book are pink, yellow, green, red, purple, and orange. The text appears in caption bubbles and is consistently in black courier type.
The book proper and the sealed CD are enclosed in a shiny, silver-coloured Mylar bag measuring 382 by 313 millimeters. The pouches of both the book and the CD were produced by C & H Packaging Company, Inc.Footnote 49 The front cover of the Mylar bag displays the words “MADONNA SEX,” all in uppercase and all in black Edel Grotesque Light type. These words, forming the title, are superimposed on a close-up nude photograph of Madonna that stretches across both sides of the bag. This photograph is brightened, painterly, and akin to a line drawing; the lines are in grey-blue, with the silver of the Mylar bag becoming the “fill” for her skin. The front shows the author with eyes closed and mouth open, and the back shows her hands clasping her breasts – thus increasing the reader's expectation of sexual or illicit content. The title appearing on the Japanese edition of the book is “SEX by MADONNA,” as opposed to simply “MADONNA SEX,” which appears on at least the UK and US editions.Footnote 50
The back cover of the bag carries the disclaimer “Warning: this book contains adult material and its exterior packaging reflects the controversial and sensitive nature of what is inside.” Given all the publicity, this disclaimer is clearly redundant, therefore self-consciously pointing to its own simulations of forbiddenness. The back cover of the bag also includes the ISBN number: 0-436-27084-6. The back aluminum cover features the same figure that appears on the Mylar bag cover of the CD: (X), the “X” shape connoting forbiddenness or sexually explicit content (as in X-rated films). This figure of an X enclosed by brackets is carved out of the aluminum so that it reveals the yellowish-green hue of the page beneath it, the last leaf of the book, [66v]. This last leaf contains the letters “S”, “E”, and, “X” superimposed over one another, as described above. The letters “SEX,” all in uppercase and in Edel Grotesque Light type, are stamped onto the front aluminum cover so strongly that the impression creates a relief on the inside front cover. The form and prominence of the metal covers and the type of the title reflect Madonna's statement: “I called my book Sex because it was a very provocative title and I knew people would buy it because of that.”Footnote 51
The title page appears on [1r]. Here is a quasi-facsimile of the title page, preserving lineation:
PHOTOGRAPHED BY STEVEN MEISEL │ ART DIRECTED BY FABIEN BARON │ EDITED BY GLENN O'BRIEN │ PRODUCED BY CALLAWAY │ PUBLISHED BY MARTIN SECKER & WARBURG
As indicated, the above text appears in uppercase. The type is Edel Grotesque Light. Note that the above text is superimposed over
ma │ don │ na │ se │ x
The underlining of the type indicates, after Gaskell,Footnote 52 that the letters appear in colour, which is a matt greenish-gold hue. All letters are in lowercase. The type is Helvetica.
THE PRODUCTION OF THE BOOK
Madonna also exerted control over the production details of Sex, demonstrating how closely the form of the book – especially its visuality – was shaped by the author herself. What was Madonna's intention for producing the book? She stated, “I'm out to open [people's] minds and get them to see sexuality in another way. Their own and others.’”Footnote 53 This innovative view of sexuality was reflected in the technological innovation of the book production. Time Warner agreed to copublish Sex on the conditions that it would not include images of penetration, explicit genitalia, sex with animals, and sex with children.Footnote 54 The images throughout Sex come close to breaking these conditions, but they never do. Whether this was always Madonna's intention, or whether she did so only to comply with her contract, we cannot know. But what remains true is that the simulation therefore is always between expected images, especially as anticipated through publicity, and the actual received images. The book is ironically self-conscious of its own fabricated status, and explicitly tells us so: “Everything you are about to see and read is a fantasy, a dream, pretend … Nothing in this book is true. I made it all up.”Footnote 55 The arrangement of the text in the “Preface” [1v] imitates in microcosmic form the publicity sequence followed by the reader–viewer of the book. When the first sentence proclaims, “This is a book about sex,” it ironically says nothing new, for the intense publicity will have already acquainted the reader with this fact. When the preface concludes, “Nothing in this book is true. I made it all up,” it textually imitates the sequence of reception followed by the reader. The deflation of the publicity hype can consist of an anticlimactic awareness of the banality of the contents. The star model is looking at and primarily pleasing herself, not us. The assertion “I made it all up” could also merely be an anticipatory legal defense, stressing the book's fictional and aesthetic nature, a familiar retort especially by writers accused of offence, such as blasphemy. This was part of Salman Rushdie's defense when his novel The Satanic Verses provoked a death sentence against him in 1989 by the Ayatollah Khoemini of Iran. I have termed such a recourse to aesthetics an aesthetic manifesto.Footnote 56 In the case of Madonna's Sex, this aesthetic manifesto is stated within the book itself. The author's act of imagining her book's censure and criticism perhaps catalyzes that very criticism, adding to the cultural hype and attention of the book. Whether the photographs are thus staged or not, they are still literal, and of literal, actual bodies, retaining their visual capacity to shock, the provocation designed and controlled by the author herself.
As a further example of Madonna's authorial control, the male gaze is subverted by a self-directed gaze, and not only a subject looking at itself, but a female one at that.Footnote 57 As Nigella Lawson observed at the time, “in Sex [sic], she is the object of her own desire.”Footnote 58 But one has to work through considerable publicity and packaging to see this visual narcissism, to reach the point of simulation.Footnote 59 The iconic status of the author, Madonna as celebrity, serves as the ultimate apparatus or paratext of the text.Footnote 60 But what the public thinks it can consume is the real Madonna via a simulated one; in the end, the distinction becomes spurious. The “icon” reveals herself to be literally an icon. The facts I stated in the introduction are worth repeating: the book contains 101 photographs, ninety-one of Madonna, eighty showing her face.
Madonna was in control of virtually every aspect of the book's production. As her photographer she hired Steven Meisel, an artist well known for his work with leading fashion magazines.Footnote 61 Meisel took 20,000 photographs.Footnote 62 Madonna personally selected all the final images. It took her one month to do so.Footnote 63 The black-and-white photographs were printed by Schneider/Erdman, Inc.Footnote 64 The colour photographs were printed by Eric Taubman and Scott Hagendorf of LTI.Footnote 65 All photographs were retouched by Bishop Studio.Footnote 66 The quadratone negatives and color separations were executed by the leading photographic printers Richard Benson and Thomas Palmer, who had worked on photographs by artists such as Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, Irving Penn, and Albert Watson.Footnote 67 The technique of color separation recognizes that while every photograph has continuous tones, when it is printed it is done so by dots, using four colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, or CMYK). The more ink that can be layered (in separate single-color layers, called process colors), the greater the depth and contrast that can be achieved; this requires understanding each photograph artistically and then translating that photograph so that it can be printed. Through this color-separation technique, Benson and Palmer were able to achieve painterly-like effects for photographs in Sex.
Warner Books hired Callaway Editions, Inc. (a part of Callaway Arts & Entertainment) to produce Sex. Founded in 1980, this book company has a reputation for art-book publishing and visual packaging, by 1992 having produced Georgia O'Keefe: One Hundred Flowers (1987) and Irving Penn: Passage (1991).Footnote 68 Callaway ordered 750,000 pounds of aluminum for the covers.Footnote 69 It took a three-story high, ultra-speed press to churn out 25,000 impressions an hour instead of the usual five thousand.Footnote 70 With this technological prowess, the time to print the book was reduced to fifteen days, from what would normally have taken six months.Footnote 71 It was sold for US$49.95, plus tax. Several printers refused to print the book on moral grounds.Footnote 72 The printing press was later revealed to be R. R. Donnelley & Sons of Chicago, whose printing roster also includes the Southern Baptist Convention Annual and the Southern Baptist Convention Book of Reports.Footnote 73 Toshiya Masuda worked as a designer at Callaway during the production of Sex, overseeing production and printing at the later stages. He remembers the excitement as the production was kept secret at Callaway, which at the time operated out of a studio in the West Village.Footnote 74 Masuda states that the Japanese edition was slightly late because it was the only edition that was not imported from the US. Because the book was banned in Japan, Masuda was part of the team that secretly brought materials into Japan (such as the printing films and negatives), so that the book could be produced there. The team felt an element of risk and even trepidation, given the finances and responsibility involved, but their mission proved successful. The book was printed by Dohosha, a relatively obscure publisher that published mostly Buddhist and religious books; after Sex, the company grew significantly. A special challenge was reproducing the cover's aluminum plates and wire binding, but Dohosha was able to source its own materials. Reflecting on the book in 2018, Masuda affirms how well suited the book's design and form are to its contents, creating curiosity and anticipation in readers.
Sex as a cultural and publicity event was not without its share of stolen photographs and government intervention. During production, some photographs were stolen and Madonna promptly enlisted the aid of the FBI.Footnote 75 The photographs were being offered to the British tabloid News of the World for US$100,000.Footnote 76 The culprit was one of the workers in the New York laboratory that had processed the film.Footnote 77 In the subsequent publicity, Vanity Fair’s prominent byline mentioning the stolen pictures and the asking price amplified the book as a cultural event, alongside the fact that Madonna's image appeared on the front cover of the October 1992 issue, with the headline “Hot Madonna!”
Priced at twenty-five pounds, Sex was published in Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg, then an imprint of Reed International Books.Footnote 78 Although in its beginning in 1935 it published mostly left-wing books, including antifascist, anticommunist and anticonservative nonfiction,Footnote 79 Secker & Warburg is now a staid name in publishing. It printed sixty-two titles in 1992. Given the expectations that Secker & Warburg would imagine its readers, and the publishing world, to have, why did they agree to Sex? Clearly seeing the book's commercial value, they paid Time Warner £1 million for the rights to the book.Footnote 80
THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE BOOK
The techniques and processes through which Sex was distributed demonstrate how the book became culturally and socially constructed. These features of distribution constructed the provocativeness of both the book and its anticipated contents, showing another dimension of how the book became a force in history. Briar Silich, head of the book's publicity in the UK, was the only person in the UK to receive a free copy of Sex.Footnote 81 Reed International bought 120,000 copies.Footnote 82 There had never been such a high first print run.Footnote 83 Some 87,000 books sold in twenty-four hours.Footnote 84 Silich allowed forty-five editors to inspect Sex in the privacy of her office, each person having to sign a statement of confidentiality.Footnote 85 Madonna chose the newspapers she wanted for coverage from a list that Silich forwarded to her.Footnote 86 The Observer was the first to buy the rights to photographs.Footnote 87 They paid £15,000 for ten photographsFootnote 88 – selected by Madonna herselfFootnote 89 – which they published in their colour magazine, selling at least 610,000 of the 700,000 copies the newspaper printed of the magazine, an increase of 40,000 over the previous week.Footnote 90 The magazine got 74,000 new readers, and lost them again the next week when the photographs were no longer run.Footnote 91 There was tight security at Secker & Warburg's warehouse, a twelve-acre site in the middle of Northamptonshire.Footnote 92 Sex was one of 15,000 titles stacked at the time.Footnote 93 It was a good test of Secker & Warburg's distribution skills, proving well their ability to despatch over 31 million books a year.Footnote 94
On the evening of 20 October 1992, a van of Omega Securicor, carrying the managing director of Reed Book Services, left from Reed's site on Sanders Lodge in Rushden, Northampshire, to make the first delivery.Footnote 95 The Reed site was adjacent to the former location of the Library and Archive of Random House UK. Jean Rose, at the time the library manager at the Random House UK site, recalls that the van was spray-painted silver to imitate the covers of Sex.Footnote 96 Hatchards, the royal booksellers, and Harrods stocked the book, the latter stating it was “listening to customers.”Footnote 97 Books, Etc. on Charing Cross Road opened at midnight to sell the first copies in the UK.Footnote 98 They sold 1,800Footnote 99 copies in seventy-five minutes.Footnote 100 Six hundred people queued in the rain.Footnote 101 The first buyers were a couple from the US, on their honeymoon. The ten central London branches of Books, Etc. eventually sold all of their 4,500 copies.Footnote 102 Robert Snugg, the group sales director of Reed Consumer Books, confirmed that all bookshops had to have their orders reduced.Footnote 103 W. H. Smith placed an order of 35,000 copies.Footnote 104 Dillons, which discounted the retail price by five pounds,Footnote 105 placed an initial order of 17,000; its marketing director, Julian Rivers, stated, “This has been the largest quantity of hardbacks we have ever bought for a new book.”Footnote 106 Dillons in Liverpool had ordered 150 books and all were accounted for by advance orders.Footnote 107 Dillons' initiative of discounting Sex’s price to twenty pounds employed the author's own marketing savvy. Sex was the biggest initial order of the season for other bookstores also, including Hammicks.Footnote 108 Waterstone's in Edinburgh received sixty copies (they asked for two hundred), selling them in forty minutes,Footnote 109 with their Liverpool location selling all twenty-five copies by noon.Footnote 110 Clifton Bookshop in Bristol ordered twenty-five copies, received ten, and sold them by noon.Footnote 111 Waterstone's in Manchester sold 210 copies by the afternoon.Footnote 112 Sussex Stationers, with twenty-four chains, refused to allow the book on its shelves, its managing director Michael Cowen stating it was not the family book they normally sell.Footnote 113
Given these prodigious sales, a reprint in early December of 120,000 was secured for the British market, all of them bought by advance order.Footnote 114 Reed was not able to put a higher order because of the book's complex production: six suppliers were involved because of its special wrapping.Footnote 115 The Reed group sales director, Robert Snugg, said, “I have never sold a hardback at £25 that has had quite such a head of steam behind it.”Footnote 116
THE RECEPTION OF THE BOOK
As with the distribution of the book, the facts surrounding the immediate reception of the book in the UK demonstrate how Sex became constructed as a cultural event of global proportions. The literary theorist Hans Jauss argues in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception that
every work belongs to a genre – whereby I mean neither more nor less than that for each work a preconstituted horizon of expectations must be ready at hand (this can be understood as a relationship of “rules of the game”) to orient the reader's (public's) understanding and to enable a qualifying reception.Footnote 117
Madonna's career up to the publication of Sex had created for the book a horizon of expectations filled with provocation and transgression, informed by the music videos for “Like a Prayer” (1989), which features a burning cross, and “Justify My Love” (1990), which features homosexual and bisexual scenes. Her 1991 documentary film Truth or Dare: In Bed with Madonna followed her daily life in great detail, well before reality television shows became commonplace. The back cover of the video of the film features a topless Madonna with the words “All Access” written on her back. As with Sex, the “access” was heavily controlled and determined by Madonna herself. Both “all” and “access” are simulated because of close authorial control. Perhaps with this sense of the irony of easy (purchasable) access in mind, the manager of a Borders book shop in Madison, Wisconsin said, “There's not a lot in [Sex] that people can't get for $3 at the newsstands.”Footnote 118 Conservative Christian leaders called Madonna's book part of “a civil war of values.”Footnote 119 Madonna's Sex has been popularly received as a coffee-table book, a diary, a collection of fantasies, a photobook, a book, a pornographic magazine; some critics have also likened it to a high-school yearbook.Footnote 120 These interpretations indicate that Sex cannot be easily categorized or contained within a specific genre. This problematization of genre reveals a problematization of content.
I will focus now on Sex’s immediate British reception. In the week that it was published, Sex quickly became the most reviewed book in the UK.Footnote 121 Although The Observer got the rights for the photographs, they did not get an interview. Madonna turned down Martin Amis on grounds that he was too famous.Footnote 122 Amis later wrote, “Sex is no more than the desperate confection of an ageing scandal-addict who, with this book, merely confirms that she is exhausting her capacity to shock.”Footnote 123 When the Sunday Times suggested Salman Rushdie, he too was rejected by Madonna.Footnote 124 The author finally accepted The Times’s head editor, Andrew Neil, and her story went on the front page, with Neil's emphasizing the lesbianism in Sex.Footnote 125 J. G. Ballard, writing in the Sunday Times, said that the book “is at first sight just a storm in a D-cup. In fact this is a commonplace book for our day, by the Daisy Ashford of the 1990s, as filled with homilies and naive dreams as the diary of any Victorian young lady.”Footnote 126 The Daily Mirror asked, “Is Madonna … a sexual crusader, an icon for the young or a phoney interested in her own hype?”Footnote 127 The Guardian called her an “unclad icon screened by wall of hype.”Footnote 128 The Daily Mail (reporting on the New York launch of Sex) said “Madonna's pathetic quest to shock (and hype her new book) continues.”Footnote 129 Today called her “the high priestess of hype, the mistress of manipulation.”Footnote 130 The Sun said she was “the queen of hype.”Footnote 131 The Daily Telegraph called her “a Picasso of self-promotion, an Einstein of media hype.”Footnote 132 Today stated that Sex was “a kind of revenge for women,”Footnote 133 arguing that Sex demonstrated to men what it is like to be portrayed in degrading images.Footnote 134 Nicholas Winterton MP made a complaint to the Obscene Publications Squad and to Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke.Footnote 135 The book was then referred to the Crown Prosecution Service,Footnote 136 but the CPS's lawyers eventually decreed there was no case for prosecution.Footnote 137
Publishers from around the world were invited to have their first look at Sex at the Frankfurt Book Fair in early October.Footnote 138 They were taken to a secret suite and were sworn not to reveal its contents until publication date.Footnote 139 A life-size cutout of Madonna greeted them, saying, “Sex – by Madonna – Don't You Want It Now?”Footnote 140 There was, of course, no movement from the “cutout” to the embodied “icon”; the collapse of that distinction was simulated. Even after Sex’s publication, Madonna chose to supply no review copies of the book to newspapers, nor did she grant permission to reproduce any of the illustrations.Footnote 141 In France police at first seized all 25,000 copies,Footnote 142 later releasing them all.Footnote 143 Madonna agreed to be interviewed by Libération journalist Laurence Romance, on the ground that she is a woman.Footnote 144 French journalist Anne Sinclair interviewed Madonna on television using an interpreter. Madonna wore a gold tooth, reproduced – to her semiotic advantage – on the cover of Newsweek, strategically appearing about ten days after Sex’s publication. Madonna herself chose Elle magazine in France to buy the rights.Footnote 145 Once again, the author closely controlled production and distribution, which allowed her to shape, to a degree, the reception of the book. Some 45,000 copies sold in Canada (priced at C$59.95), with most of the initial shipment of 23,000 copies selling within the first day.Footnote 146 Sex was widely covered in Italy, its 12,000 copies selling quickly.Footnote 147 Five thousand copies successfully made their way into Ireland via Belfast because the then newly appointed Censorship of Publications Board (CPB) did not have time to examine the book.Footnote 148 Twenty-three days after Sex’s arrival, however, the CPB published its ban, but over 2,500 copies had already been sold.Footnote 149 In Japan thirty copies were seized by customs officials, based on Japan's unwritten obscenity laws prohibiting the showing of genitals and pubic hair.Footnote 150 The book was censored until the publishers, Dohosha, published a revised copy of Sex. The publishers did so in accordance with the above obscenity laws, and delivered 150,000 copies ready for 1 December.Footnote 151 In Australia, the bookshop chain Dymocks banned Sex from all its forty-two outlets.Footnote 152 Its managing director claimed it was “just not Dymocks.”Footnote 153 Dymocks was considered the only major bookshop in the world to take such action.Footnote 154
CONCLUSION: SEX, AMERICA, AND AMERICAN STUDIES
The mechanics of stardom functioned as a paratext necessary to the publishing success of Sex. In 1995, Madonna stated,
Everyone went out and bought Sex, it was sold out in two seconds. And then everybody slagged me off. That, to me is a statement of the hypocrisy of the world that we live in. The fact that everybody is so interested in sex but won't admit it … I made my point completely and people know I made my point and that's why they're so pissed off at me.Footnote 155
Apart from substantive debates about matters of ethics, morality, and hypocrisy, one commentator stated, “For all her antics, all she ever exposes are the mechanics of stardom in the late twentieth century.”Footnote 156 The bibliographic features of the book – such as the limited number of impressions, the packaging, and the tightly controlled viewings and serial rights – all served to create an anticipation that the text would expose the most private life of its famous author.
But in Sex’s negotiation between anticipation and reception, it destabilizes the very distinction between what is real and the representation of that reality. The philosopher Jean Baudrillard in Simulacrum and Simulation describes four stages of the transformation of an image into a simulacrum. In the first stage, the image is a representative appearance. In the second stage, it is an image that masks reality. In the third stage, the image plays at being an appearance. In the fourth and final stage, it moves from the order of appearance to simulation, becoming its own simulacrum.Footnote 157 In the space of anticipating the book's contents, Baudrillard's first stage is manifest, for Sex seems to be a representative appearance of pornography, with the Mylar bag even telling us so. The second stage, the masking and “denaturing”Footnote 158 of the reality, is manifest through the author's close control of production and distribution. With its principal subject as author, Sex was not produced in the manner of a conventional pornographic magazine.Footnote 159 The contrived nature of the photographs achieves the third stage of playing at being an appearance; some of the photographs even show its subjects in childlike play. Finally, the stage of simulation is reached when we recognize that all we access is the author accessing herself, figuratively and literally, with her pleasure perhaps prioritized over that of her audience. Her identity is further problematized through her immediate assumption of the persona of Dita Parlo, a French actress admired by the author. The first words of [3r] are: “My name is Dita.”Footnote 160
In Sex, who is speaking and who is controlling whom? At the level of simulation, these distinctions become problematic. The movement from reality to hyperreality could account for Madonna's enduring success, the label “icon” perhaps not ironic when a living individual has become as ubiquitous and disseminated as an easily reproducible sign itself, one becoming the other.Footnote 161 Among the most recent scholarship on Sex, Roozbeh Araghi proposes the term “pornobiography” to argue that the book should be seen
as an intertextual exploration of the Sex life that may (not) be Madonna's; as a set of texts in which semi-fictive subjectivity interrupts pornography and erotica; and as a set of texts which permit other authors to mirror, amplify and redefine this process and use [the book] to (re)read their own lives.Footnote 162
The (auto)biographical elements (the “biography” in “pornobiography”) of Sex’s production show Madonna's agency and control. That the text then had a global life and impact through distribution and reception (propelled in part by the “porno” in “pornobiography”) shows how the sign “Madonna” became disseminated and internalized by the public. The bibliographic suppleness and resilience of Sex demonstrate that the signs constituting and constructing Madonna's iconicity are not just visual but grounded in solid bibliographic details, with production, distribution, and reception in complementary relation with one another.Footnote 163
The bibliographic resilience of Sex is also grounded in American book history and its constructions of America. There is insufficient space to chronicle the full span of American book history, but by examining early colonial America we can trace the influence on Sex of a tradition in which religious freedom, itself entailing the concept of personal liberty, figures centrally in notions of America, with these values reflected in and informed by early print culture. This print culture was influenced by the Protestant Reformation, which, in opposition to the sacramentalism of Catholicism, emphasized the written word, leading to a significant increase in printing, with some viewing the invention of printing as divine providence, leading people to the true faith.Footnote 164 Book production in Germany in the 1520s was four times higher than it was in 1517; the Frankfurt Book Fair, where Madonna first showed Sex to publishers, began in 1454 and is the largest of its kind in the world.Footnote 165 The printed book for the religious communities of early colonial America – including English Puritans, English Catholics, Quakers, Mennonites, German sectarians, Huguenots, Dutch Reformed, Anglicans, and Scotch Presbyterians – strengthened their religious practice and gave them coherence, given their precariousness of surviving in a new land and fleeing persecution and exclusion in Europe.Footnote 166 Because the practice of their religion was closely grounded in books, these communities actively patronized local printers and imported books from Europe.Footnote 167 Madonna's work is well known for its Christian imagery, frequently combined with sexualized images, and Sex is no exception with its images of crosses and rosaries. While many factors and movements across the centuries, including American feminism, inform the concepts of individual liberty (including sexual expression) and religious freedom, situating Sex within American book history shows the enduring influence of the early links among religious freedom, personal liberty, and the printing and circulation of books.
Published in 1992, Sex is also informed by the tremendous growth in the American book publishing industry in the decades following World War II, with mergers and consolidations of enterprises across magazines, newspapers, book publishing, and book retailing (which set a precedent for the collaboration between Time Warner and Madonna's company, Maverick).Footnote 168 This was influenced in part by the pressures of the Cold War to assert American influence overseas (especially moral superiority over the Soviets) through cultural diplomacy.Footnote 169 While the imperatives of the Cold War at times led to the quelling of free expression (particularly during the McCarthy era), the culture of the 1960s impacted publishing through the relaxing of regulations against sexual language and content. Equally important was the publication of such landmark books as Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), which opened public space for the discussion of sexuality, and the Boston Women's Health Collective's Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973), groundbreaking in its discussion of women's sexuality. With the demise of communism in eastern Europe in 1989, and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, the years immediately preceding Sex became a prime historical moment to exert and further establish American global influence and dominance. Through its worldwide distribution, multiple global editions, and provocative content, Sex achieved and enhanced the global reach not only of its author but also of Americanness. That the contents of Sex were highly objectionable (morally and otherwise) to some audiences is less relevant, in terms of global presence and domination, than the sheer number of copies distributed around the world, and the book's enormous profits; as with colonialism and imperialism, it is economic domination rather than moral right that creates and sustains power, though the former is often disguised as, if not equated with, the latter. Madonna representing Americanness internationally was neither novel nor exceptional in 1992, for she had already enjoyed global fame by at least 1987, when she launched her first world tour (Who's That Girl World Tour), which earned approximately US$25 million.Footnote 170 But what was exceptional was the publication of a self-authored book, no less as innovative as Sex, which added another dimension and medium (print) to Madonna's – and America's – global presence.
If “New World” and “First World” innovation and technological creativity constitute Americanness – especially from the perspective of the rest of the world, and particularly from nations formerly colonized by Euro-America – then Sex embodies and reinforces the connection of innovation and technological creativity with America. The book also demonstrates and strengthens American narratives of freedom of speech, thought, and religion. Given that book history and American studies analyze books and America respectively as forces in history, the intersection of these two disciplines can yield insights into the physical correlatives to cultural constructs, and how national culture in turn expresses itself in physical objects, what we can consider as the bibliography of America and the Americanness of bibliography. The bibliographic facts of Sex are signposts to the construction of an enduring cultural, national, and global phenomenon – both the icon and the text.
