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The magazine flourished, and from its London base established a niche in the US. In the process he created the soft-focus style that became aPenthouse hallmark. Butin those early days at least, he led by example, working round the clock and personally taking the photos of his models. Guccione might have beenarrogant verging on megalomaniac.
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Guccione appealed and won and, helped by this windfall of free publicity, never looked back.
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Its first issue was confiscated by the British Post Office on the grounds that he was using the mail to distribute pornography.
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"If there's room for one, there's room for two," Guccione often said of his brainchild. He then ran his own mail-order business before conceiving the idea of Penthouse, as a raunchier version of Playboy. There his first job was as an editor for an expatriate weekly, the London American. He lived in what was said to be the largest townhouse in Manhattan, costing $5m a year to run, with 30 rooms and a Roman-style swimming pool on the ground floor, and where he put together an art collection to die for. By the early 1980s, Guccione's estimated personal fortune of $400m secured him a place on Forbes magazine's list of the 400 richest Americans. Pubic hair, full-frontal female and male nudes, close-ups of the clitoris, lesbian scenes, urination, fetishism fantasies and much, much more – all appeared for the first time at your friendly neighbourhood newsstand in the men's magazine he launched in 1965, and in Viva, a counterpart of Penthouse for women that followed a few years later. But there were no decorous adornments to Penthouse, his defining contribution to western sexual liberation in the second half of the 20th century. At one stage he seemed destined for the priesthood – which may explain why Bob Guccione later poured $17.5m of his pornography-generated fortune into surely the only X-rated film in history that started with a quotation from the Bible.