The Erskine Press building at 17 East 13th Street is currently the home of the Singaporean cocktail bar Singlish. But the Village Preservation plaque to the left of the doorway yields a clue to a rich literary history.

Butterick Publishing Company

I love that in the 1890s, Butterick printed their women’s dress patterns at this location. I have wonderful memories of going with my mother and younger sister Kim to the enormous sewing supply store Dressew, on Hastings Street in Vancouver. Kim and I would look through the patterns as our mom took hours to select fabrics and trimmings.

There were patterns by Vogue and Butterick. The line drawings on the 1960s patterns showed impossibly slender, elegant women. The patterns in the 70’s started to use photographs of smiling “mod” young women. During this period my mom made most of our clothes, often sewing matching outfits for all three of us. She made summer dresses of a pale blue fabric with tiny yellow flowers, and white satin blouses under red sleeveless dresses for Christmas time. What a kick to discover that the Butterick printing press was just a few blocks from my home in New York!

Anaïs Nin Moves In

The East Village building became the home of Erskine Press in 1895. Check out the Daytonian in Manhattan site for a fascinating history of this address, including a 1930s newspaper called The Villager that decamped for a bigger space in 1944. From 1944-1946, Anaïs Nin and her lover Gonzalo More operated Gemor Press at this location. Nin self-published her own work as well as the writings of other authors such as Max Ernst and Hugh Chisolm during this period.

Then she landed a contract with Dutton publishers, and soon after Gemor Press folder under “a mountain of debt.” It’s a miracle, but the low-rise building has survived intact, with the 1895 Erskine Press imprint still emblazoned across the elegant gray façade.

My crew member Amy suggested this location when she spotted the Anaïs Nin plaque, and I excitedly agreed, recalling my personal memories of reading Nin’s erotica in my teens. According to multiple sources, including the indispensable Wikipedia, today Nin is regarded as one of the leading female writers of the 20th century and a source of inspiration for women challenging conventionally defined gender roles.

Anaïs Nin’s Influence

Born in 1903 to talented Cuban musician parents in France, Ángela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin Culmell – Anaïs Nin — had a strong sense of destiny as a writer. This drove her throughout her life, and she is one of the most prolific diarists the world has known, writing more than 15,000 pages (150 volumes) from age 11 until her death in 1977. She also wrote and published novels, short stories, and erotica. Busca biografias has a wonderful audio clip of Anaïs speaking of this drive: “I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.”

My earliest influences were Enid Blyton, Judy Blume, Tolkien, and Agatha Christie, and by the time I was the same age that Anaïs Nin began journaling, 11, I too wanted to be a writer. I didn’t have the same self-confidence she did, and my path was more circuitous, but by my 20s I was working as a professional writer and publishing in multiple genres, including erotica.

Discovering Erotica

It was the discovery of Anaïs Nin’s erotica, in 1977 (I discovered Delta of Venus, and later Little Birds at the Burnaby Public Library!), that opened up my view of what kind of life is possible for a woman. Always living an unconventional life, pursuing freedom even when it meant pain and loneliness, the women portrayed in Nin’s erotica had a strange darkness that plumbed the depths of the human psyche. She originally wrote these stories for an anonymous “collector” in the 1940s. Before she died, Nin decided to have her early diaries published, as well as the books of erotica. When I read Delta of Venus, the year it was published in 1977, life was never the same. (Of course it wouldn’t be, since I was only 12!) Nonetheless, her stories opened up a magical vista of sexual adventures that sparked my imagination and made me determined to look for more out of life than settling down to an early marriage and children. I wanted to experience all life had to offer, especially in the erotic realm.

Re-reading these stories now, they have a bleakness I didn’t remember. Many of her characters come to a bad end of loneliness, insanity, drug addiction and death—as though they must be punished for fulfilling their erotic fantasies. I wonder if this reflects an ambivalence Anaïs Nin struggled with, yearning for freedom and risking safety and society’s approval in order to attain it.

She was also a ground-breaker in the way she wrote about women’s inner experience. She began psychoanalysis in the early 1930s, for some periods seeing her analyst daily (she worked with Rene Allendy, and later with Otto Rank). I have no doubt she fought for self-awareness and freedom, and inspired many women to do the same.

The Erotic Psyche

Reconciling the bleakness I felt reading her stories now with the joy I felt when I first read them more than 40 years ago, it’s interesting to reflect on how I’ve grown and changed. I have to remind myself of something I learned about the nature of fantasy during my own journey of sexual exploration.

Anaïs Nin wrote sensational fantasies for a dollar a page for an invisible patron she never met, and some of her friends did the same. The stories sprang from her imagination, from French erotica she read, and from stories her literary crowd in Paris recounted in the 1940s, in addition to her own experiences. However disturbing they might seem, depending on your own point of view, fantasy has a very important role in freeing up the life force of eroticism, especially for those whose life energies were repressed in their families, schools, churches, and social groups. The Erotic Mind, by San Francisco psychotherapist and sex therapist Jack Morin, is a wonderful gulp of fresh air on the subject of the power of fantasy to bring wholeness and fulfilment into our relationships. Fantasy gives us a safe way to express and explore taboos without hurting anyone. Of course, not everyone stays within the confines of fantasy, but that’s beyond the scope of today’s column.

For more about Anaïs Nin, see the Anaïs Nin foundation and Anaïs Nin.org. The latter site has many personal recollections of Anaïs, including this Adele Aldridge memory: “Valerie and I met Anaïs Nin for the first time in October of 1971. My journal records: Anaïs’s hair is long and dyed a red-gold color and is combed up on top of her head. She is wearing dark eye make-up and very red lipstick. Her dress is black wool and long, to the floor. Her eyes are a marvelous open blue. She wears suede purple sandals which I admire.”

Style Inspiration

Adele’s description provided artistic direction for the shoot—red lipstick, long black dress. The golden shoes were discovered and brought to my door by my dear friend Betsy!

About that dress… Lynn Dell Cohen founded and operated the Off Broadway Boutique for 50 years. I described how I discovered Lynn’s Off Broadway Boutique via the film Advanced Style in my October 2021 column, D&G in Chelsea. I visited the boutique on my first trip to New York in 2014, while Lynn was still alive. I bought this gown on my second visit to the store, in October 2015. Sadly, Lynn had passed away that summer, and some of her favorite clothes were for sale. This is the full-length glamorous black lace negligée I told you about! It took eight years for me to find the right occasion to wear it. This glamorous gown seems fitting for a tribute to Anaïs Nin. It certainly makes me feel like one of the characters in her short stories!

It was one of our raciest shoots, and more than one passerby stopped to take pictures, while some families with young children hurried by with eyes averted. Hey, this is New York! They should be used to people wearing lingerie on the streets! I definitely felt I was living out a hidden exhibitionist fantasy. (No one was harmed in the shooting of this column.) Thank you, Anaïs.

Style Notes

• Sheer silky black negligee with lace insets, cream ribbon, and pleated skirt. Nylon Lingerie by Blanche. Off Broadway Boutique. 139 W. 72nd St. (now closed).
• “Glamorous” gold snakeskin platform sandals with crisscross ankle straps. Housing Works, 245 West 10th St.
• Long strand of pearls. Dressew. 337 West Hastings St., Vancouver, BC.
• Black, cream, and cinnamon faux Lorax fur coat. Mademoiselle Mirabelle. 330 Bleecker St. (now closed).
• Turquoise and red 70’s pop art martini glass. Gift from a friend.
• Turquoise ostrich feather. Abracadabra. 19 W. 21st St.
• 1950s folding card chair with walnut legs and turquoise and gold brocade seat. Pippin Vintage Home (now closed).
• M.A.C Red lipstick by MAC. Big Apple Red nail polish by OPI.

Soundtrack

Blondie Parallel Lines. See my Punk-Up at CBGBs for more about this album.