Hester Nash curates one of the largest collections of porno-bilia on the Net

There's something sexy about a girl caught off guard. That's one of the reasons that my favorite pinup artist is Gil Elvgren. Many of his paintings from the '40s, '50s, and '60s feature a woman doing an ordinary task - barbecuing, watering the lawn, shopping-when all of a sudden, her skirt is pulled up, revealing stockings and garters, and maybe offering a peek at panties. The woman looks shocked but never horrified, and there is always a bit of smile in the O of her perfectly painted lips. The scenes are charming and campy; that the artist had to create the pretense of why we're suddenly seeing up some girl's skirt is, well, sweet. It's simultaneously voyeuristic and innocent, since the setup implies that as a viewer, I just saw something I wasn't supposed to. Except for an occasional look at bare breasts, there's very little nudity. Yet Elvgren's images are really sexy to me, in spite of and because of their old-fashioned naughtiness.

Hester Nash knows plenty about nooky from the past. She curates retroraunch.com, one of the largest collections of vintage porn on the Web. Launched in 1997, the membership site features over 43,000 images (mostly photography) from the 19th century to the 1970s. Nash began buying erotic photos from antique dealers, scanning the images, and organizing them by decade. As the site's membership and popularity grew, collectors sent her digital files of images from their personal collections. Even regular folks who had "stumbled" upon old erotica (who knew that Grandpa was such a perv?) sent it to her to share with the world. Because she features only images that are in the public domain or uncopyrighted, you won't see spreads from old issues of Playboy. You will, however, see an amazing array of naked men and women posing or doing the nasty through the decades. (Click here for full article)