The Collector

The Unlikely Man With the World’s Largest Collection of Erotica

I continue to be drawn to classic erotica. Pauline Réage. Henry Miller. D. H. Lawrence. Marquis de Sade. Emmanuelle Arsan. John Cleland. Orrie Hitt. A. N. Roquelaure, otherwise known as Anne Rice. Their works are a wonderful mix of sex and romance, of hunger and feelings, of desire and confusion. They tease us and tantalize us and string us along as we eagerly hope for the consummation of our carnal cravings. There’s a depth to classic erotic I often find missing in more contemporary stories which tend to be quite clinical in their expositions of sex. As I work on my writing craft I hope to be more like these pioneers in the genre.

Nobody understood that erotica could be both sexual and sentimental like Anaïs Nin. I’ve been reading some of the works of Nin in recent days, including House of Incest (it’s not what you think), A Spy in the House of Love, and Delta of Venus. I dropped a few hidden references to Anaïs Nin in my latest erotic mystery novella, Laci Kicklighter in The Sommelier’s Dirty Little Book of Mile-High Secrets, which releases on Amazon on January 24th. I’m so excited to share this story with you and if you’d like to read it you can find it here.

Anaïs Nin, who, along with the unequaled Henry Miller, fled from Paris at the start of World War II and came to the United States in 1939. Miller and Nin weren’t just writing compadres. They and Henry’s wife, June, became friends, and then the three became lovers (perhaps you’ve seen the 1990 Uma Thurman movie Henry & June). When an agent approached Henry to write erotica for an anonymous and quite wealthy man in Oklahoma, he first deferred the offer to Anaïs, who needed the money, and quickly agreed. And she wouldn’t be the only author to write privately commissioned smut for the unknown collector. All told the list included about twenty such writers. But of them all, she became the most famous. And for twenty years, this wealthy purveyor of literary porn paid her and the other writers to churn out two new stories a week for him.

Keep in mind this was in the 1940s when obscenity laws forbade the writing and selling of stories featuring explicit sex. Everyone had to be careful. Everyone had to be anonymous. There was always a middleman.

For Anaïs, the offer to write naughty stories for a private collector not only meant a chance to use and hewn her craft. It also meant food on the table. When the writer fled Europe she entered the U.S. without much, and the chance to make money doing something she loved was an opportunity to etch out a living. And, though she wouldn’t know it at the time, the commission by the collector paved the way for her to become the greatest female erotica writer of the twentieth century.

Roy Johnson in an undated photo.

And it’s all because of an almost forgotten Presbyterian who wanted to read a couple of naughty stories each week.

His name was Roy Melisander Johnson. Businessman. Oil man. Newspaperman. Statesman. Churchman. And the world's greatest collector of privately commissioned erotica.

Roy was born in 1881 and lived in the little town of Ardmore, Oklahoma, about an hour and a half north of Dallas on the other side of the Red River. Imagine my surprise when I discovered he had lived so close to me! He was a staunch Republican in a Democratic region and began the Ardmore Statesman to promote his Republican ideals. Shortly thereafter he made his fortune in oil, striking black gold, and founding the Healdton Petroleum Company at the age of 32 in 1913. By the 1940s, his wealth secure, he was commissioning erotica for his collection.

His stint as a newspaperman put him in contact with editors across the country, and he used these contacts to solicit stories anonymously from the writers. The highly successful businessman and church attendee needed to keep his literary kink a secret, so he agreed to pay these middlemen $200 per story. The contacts were to keep half and give the author half. Unfortunately for the authors, the editors often kept much more than their share, and the writers were left with only pitiable amounts for their efforts.

Anaïs Nin in 1960. She never was able to meet her mysterious “collector.”

Roy’s first wife did not accept her husband’s penchant for the naughty and wouldn’t let his growing collection in their mansion. The typewritten manuscripts would remain in steel filing cabinets in his office until she died and Roy remarried to a woman 25 years his junior. Wife number two felt differently about the matter and at Roy’s passing the manuscripts were found in a locked vault inside his home library. With his death, much of the collection was sold, and many of the stories were republished under different titles in pulp magazines. Anaïs Nin collected many of the stories she wrote for him and published them under her name in the 1970s, the most well-known volume being Delta of Venus. The stories made her the most prolific and most well-known female author of erotica of the twentieth century. By then she had come to terms with what she had provided for “the collector” as she referred to Roy. Thirty years earlier, her feelings for the secret man from Ardmore were less than admirable.

During the time of her erotic contributions to Roy’s collection, Anaïs often referred to herself as a madam, prostituting the other writers to contribute to their unknown benefactor’s naughty habit. Often, when she sent a story to an agent who would pass it along to Roy, the agent would tell her the story was good but that his wealthy client didn’t want emotion or feelings getting in the way of the story. “More sex,” he told her. “More sex. That’s what the old man wants..” Anaïs’s diary pens her feelings on the matter.

I was sure the old man knew nothing about the beatitudes, the ecstasties, dazzling reverberations, of sexual encounters. Cut out the poetry was his message. Clinical sex, deprived of all the warmth of love—the orchestration of all the senses, touch, hearing, sight, palate; all the euphoric accomplishments, background music, moods, atmosphere, variations—forced him to resort to literary aphrodisiacs. (from Delta of Venus, p. x)

She even claimed that writing sex without feelings of love almost made her and her co-writers give up writing and take vows of chastity as he was stripping away their aphrodisiac of poetry. And yet, she continued to write for her benefactor. She couldn’t pass up the money. And though she even demanded to meet him in person on one occasion to know what kind of man “the collector” was, she was never permitted. Until he died in 1960, Roy was simply her unknown patron of erotica. Very few knew of Roy’s passion for literary sex. And yet, story by story, this most unlikely of men amassed the world’s largest collection of privately commissioned erotica and, in the process, made one writer the most prolific female author of erotica in the 1900s.

Roy Johnson’s mansion today in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Referred to by the locals as The Otey Johnson Estate, the house is now the offices of the Ardmore Institute of Health, founded in 1947 by Roy’s son Dr. Otey Johnson. (Photo taken by Mandy Valentine)

Today, many of Roy’s commissioned stories have been recollected and safely tucked away at Southern Illinois University’s Special Collections Research Center. Their collection includes nearly 1,200 typewritten pages of erotica, or 82 separate stories, jokes, poems, and songs.

Who would’ve guessed that one of Oklahoma’s most well-known statesmen, a wealthy oilman, a committed deacon at the Presbyterian Church of Ardmore, and a man who served on the boards of many organizations would also be such an avid collector of erotica?

But more than that, this secret collector from the small town of Ardmore, Oklahoma, helped feed a struggling writer and unwittingly turn her into one of the great erotica authors of the last century.

As I write, I am mindful of the great cloud of witnesses who’ve gone before those of us who write erotica. Writers like Anaïs Nin made it possible for the rest of us to have the freedom to write and publish what we enjoy and make it more easily accessible than it was when she was writing. Hopefully, we don’t have to hide our naughty stories in cold steel filing cabinets like poor Roy did with his first wife.

By the way, I made the 90-minute trip to Ardmore this past week to see the house where Roy lived and kept Anaïs’s stories. The locals, I discovered, refer to the sprawling granite stone house with its sloping red Spanish-tiled roof as the Otey Johnson Estate House. Otey was the only son of Roy and his first wife. The house is now the administrative office of the Ardmore Institute of Health, a non-profit organization founded in 1947 by the Johnson family. When Dr. Otey Johnson died in 1987 he left the estate to the Institute. Nobody I talked to knew that the house at one point had held the world’s largest collection of privately commissioned erotica. Nobody seemed to realize the impact their historic citizen had on the development of erotica and its most famous female author.

Before her death, Anaïs Nin agreed to publish under her name many of the stories she’d written privately for Roy Melisander Johnson, the oilman from Ardmore, Oklahoma. Delta of Venus and Little Birds are her most well-known collections.