Guccione's staff, which included family members, often described the publisher as mercurial. He wandered Europe as a painter for several years.Īpril Guccione said her husband was working as a cartoonist and a manager of self-service laundries in London when he got the idea of starting a magazine more explicit and aimed more squarely at "regular guys" than Playboy, which cultivated an upscale image. He spent several months in a Catholic seminary before dropping out to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. Guccione was born in Brooklyn and attended prep school in New Jersey. FriendFinder made a bid this year for Playboy, which now outsells Penthouse roughly 10 to one, but Hefner has rejected it. Penthouse and related properties are now owned by FriendFinder Networks Inc., a Boca Raton, Fla.-based company that offers social networking and online adult entertainment, including some with the Penthouse brand. In 2004, a private-equity investor from Florida acquired Penthouse in a bankruptcy sale. "The future has definitely migrated to electronic media," Guccione acknowledged in a 2002 New York Times interview. Over the first six months of 2010, Penthouse reported circulation of barely 178,000. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, Penthouse's circulation dipped below 1 million in the late 1990s and fell to about 463,000 in 2003, the year General Media Inc. Sales dropped after the Meese commission report and years later took another hit with the proliferation of X-rated videos and Web sites. Guccione called the report "disgraceful" and doubted it would have any impact, but newsstands and convenience stores responded by pulling Penthouse from their magazine racks. Attorney General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography issued a report attacking the adult entertainment industry.
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