Dian Hanson – Chronicles, Part 4: The Taschen Years – Podcast 142

2024-08-18

By the mid 1990s, Dian Hanson could’ve been forgiven for thinking that she’d finally made it – and that nothing was going to derail her career in magazine publishing that had started two decades earlier. She’d had an improbable and volatile journey, from a troubled upbringing and difficult marriage, to working as a nurse in rural Pennsylvania, before somehow launching an explicit men’s magazine called Puritan for the mob in New York. There followed a succession of writing, publishing, and editing jobs on men’s magazines whose names eloquently reveal their sexual content: Hooker, Expose’, Partner, Adult Cinema Review, and Juggs, to nam...

She’d had an improbable and volatile journey, from a troubled upbringing and difficult marriage, to working as a nurse in rural Pennsylvania, before somehow launching an explicit men’s magazine called Puritan for the mob in New York. There followed a succession of writing, publishing, and editing jobs on men’s magazines whose names eloquently reveal their sexual content: Hooker, Expose’, Partner, Adult Cinema Review, and Juggs, to name a few.

Her greatest triumph was Leg Show magazine – which Dian turned into a high-selling juggernaut. It was a match made in heaven: Dian, long fascinated and deeply compassionate about sexual quirks and fetish, an audience that was crying out for a more intimate connection with their magazine, and a publisher, George Mavety, who gave Dian near-complete creative control.

But then just as everything seemed to be working out perfectly, the internet happened – crippling the sex magazine business. To make matters worse, her employer, George Mavety, died. The good times were suddenly retreating into the rear-view mirror.

In this final episode in the series, Dian talks about what happened next, and how she re-invented herself with Taschen books, a story that includes characters as diverse as Linda Lovelace, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Crumb, transvestite model Kim Christy and transsexual porn star Sulka, Vanessa Del Rio, and many more.

You can listen to the Episode 1 here, Episode 2 here, and Episode 3 here.

This podcast is 52 minutes long.

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Dian in ‘Crumb‘ documentary, 1991

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Photo for Crumb portrait

R. Crumb portrait

Dian standing on Leg Show reader, 1995

New York, 2000

Dian and Larry Flynt event, 2008

With Liz Earls of ‘Days of the Cougar’ book, 2011

Explaining porn at Los Angeles Public Library, c. 2012