Robert Rosen got into the adult-magazine trade to earn money after his other avenues of writing closed off in a recession. In early 1983, eight years out of City College, he applied for an editorial position he’d found in a New York Times classified ad. “I needed a job,” he writes, “a job was offered to me, and I took it.” From the outset, then, and through the remainder of the book, it’s mostly in terms of work that Rosen experienced the field of pornography. (True confessions: I know Rosen and work with his wife.)

Like most businesses, this one had its particular flavors of craziness. After one or two early jobs, Rosen chose to appear in mastheads only under a pseudonym, almost unheard of elsewhere in journalism or film, routine in the porn biz. A publisher’s response to a set of layouts often depended on his recent cocaine intake--the more he’s had, the better they look. Attending a Halloween party at a New York club called Hellfire given by Al Goldstein’s Screw magazine, for which his girlfriend worked, Rosen had to pay admittance despite being on the guest list (Goldstein believed that nothing in the realm of sex should ever be free for anyone). The event featured various lurid scenes of the kind that club was known for but also gave Rosen a chance to converse with Buck Henry, who had earlier written the screenplay for The Graduate and was better known at the time for a recurring role as Uncle Roy on Saturday Night Live, in skits that (a footnote informs us) were later classified as child pornography and banned from re-broadcast. Rosen’s nightclub encounter with a show-biz personality would’ve been the most normal scene in the book had it not taken place in front of a dominatrix whipping a naked man.

Despite the weirdness, though, for Rosen the skin trade was still a business. What the editor of High Society told him during his interview for that first job, “This is just a regular office, with regular people,” more or less proved true. (You may not have seen anything like it, but I have.) The business paid him increasingly well and saddled him with an increasing workload--he gives occasional evidence of the former and frequent reports of the latter--which is a lot like what successful young entrants find in any number of other fields. If you have a knack for the work, as it turned out Rosen did, you’re given more of it to do. That’s how he found himself editing multiple publications at once, making repeated trips to Europe to discover new models, and enjoying a bank account that he says was ballooning like repeatedly enhanced breasts.

Beaver Street isn’t purely a work of personal history. Its full title, whose numerous components carry a whiff of the post-modern, is Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography: From the Birth of Phone Sex to the Skin Mag in Cyberspace: An Investigative Memoir. As a note in the prologue explains, Rosen uses “investigative memoir” to describe “the interplay of the personal and historical.” How that works, and a likely reason for his choosing the approach, becomes clear in the text. Rosen got into porn at a pretty dramatic time and had an indirect connection with many of the big developments, but in order to give these changes their due, he includes some good old-fashioned reporting and research to extend the story beyond his personal experience.

High Society, where he began his career, had invented phone sex the year before and expanded it with the use of 976 lines shortly before his arrival. The pay lines (misleadingly promoted as “Free Phone Sex” in the magazine, presumably because callers were charged nothing but the price of the call) began bringing in some $70,000 a week in extra income for the publisher and $245,000 a week for the phone company, then called New York Telephone. Rosen concisely dramatizes that eye-opening bit of business in Chapter Two. A little later, he recounts the history of Swank Publications, founded under another name during the Great Depression, which surprisingly connects Stan Lee, Marvel Comics, and writers such as Mario Puzo with the company that, by the time Rosen worked for it, was almost entirely a porn outfit. More potent material arrives in Chapter Ten, Rosen’s discussion of the Traci Lords affair. Here, Rosen (like almost everyone else in the entire industry) was affected because, once it was discovered that this immensely popular young woman had been underage for all but one job of her entire career (a film), a looming government sweep required the archives of his magazine to be searched and cleansed of any trace of her image. The broader story as Rosen presents it, touching on government commissions and Lords’s concealment of her age among other things, defies short summary. This 35-page chapter is an excellent piece of work that probably deserves to be excerpted somewhere. It’s well documented, carefully argued, and apart from a few obvious speculations sounds reliable, but the true-madness elements have something of the tone of gonzo journalism. Though I can’t speak from much experience, the writing here (and elsewhere) in some ways calls to mind Hunter S. Thompson’s calmer productions.

Despite all my talk, and Rosen’s talk, of his work in business terms, he wasn’t doing it with his eyes closed, nor does he avoid explicitly describing the material. (Readers, be warned.) He was certainly aware of its effect on him, to judge from such remarks as “I’d not only become unmoored from all sense of conventional sexual mores, but… I’d ceased to think rationally about sex itself.” And when he talks in terms of churning out “filth” and the like, you get the sense he means it in two ways: partly as an industry appropriation that neutralized its charged meaning elsewhere, partly in recognition of that broader meaning. To adapt a remark of Ibsen’s, Rosen didn’t go into the sewers to clean them up, but he wasn’t there to bathe in them either. They’re where he found work (as I already said), putting him in the same situation as many of the women appearing before the cameras; unlike them, he remained useful for years, but eventually he wasn’t willing to do it anymore, and it’s easy to understand why.

In a hybridized memoir built on personal experience but extended to historical and legal matters, it’s conceivable that Rosen could’ve addressed more social issues as well. Why does so much pornography aim to please men and not women? Does it mean anything that a lot of women work behind the scenes alongside men to produce it, as Rosen makes clear they do? How did America come to create and consume so much of it while intermittently launching major bouts of hand wringing and attempts at suppression? (My answer to the last would involve noting that materialism and Puritanism are both solidly rooted in America’s past.) But the book feels complete without those discussions.

I have only one complaint: Other than attributing quotations, Rosen frequently omits sources for his data. But that doesn’t affect the reading experience.

An October 1, 2011, Economist article observed that porn tropes have “shifted the boundaries of normality.” Porn itself has achieved a measure of normality. Young mainstream entertainers often seek to “porn up,” as a friend of mine put it. This is the social context in which Rosen’s book appears. The time seems opportune. Beaver Street is fascinating, eye opening, sometimes disturbing (in multiple ways), and probably one of a kind--I know of nothing like it.

Two side notes: I read an advance reading copy and haven’t compared my few quotations with a final edition. The book was first published in the U.K. in 2010, in a paper edition from Headpress; it’s now available in the United States in paperback or as an e-book for Kindle or Nook, and in other countries as well.