It was cool to subscribe to Playboy, to have it delivered right in the mail box of your very own bachelor apartment. The magazine came in a wrapper. I guess the wrapper may have been another brilliant brain child of Hugh Hefner, the Playboy founder and publisher, who didn't want to encourage the mailman to keep of all the copies for himself. Maybe?
Penthouse was a magazine, you brought from the news stand. You didn't mind others in the store seeing you buy it. The news stands that sold Penthouse, back in the day, catered to male customers, who knew why you were in the store. Going into the store was the trick. Before you went in, you stood back away from the shop, looked in both directions, to make sure no persons who you knew were around, and no person who looked like people you knew were looking. Once assured that the coast was clear, you darted into the store. You didn't spend too much time in the store. You knew exactly what you wanted, the magazine that you came in the store to get. You got it, paid for it, then you stood at the door. You looked in all directions, and if the coast was clear, you darted out of the shop. If the coast wasn't clear you waited until it was. Sometimes there were a line of a half a dozen dudes waiting to exit the shop.
Hugh Hefner's Playboy was all about reading the very interesting and exciting articles, about getting hip, learning how to be cool, about many things, and about sex, especially about sex., Penthouse was just about sex and raunchy pictures. The mag didn't require much use of the brain, just the eye balls, and, well, maybe, a tiny, little, wee bit of the imagination, and the mag was a big hit with us then younger dudes.
In an obit for Mr. Guccione there is this line -- Penthouse magazine "came on the scene in 1969 with a dash of tabloid sensibility and more graphic images, billing itself as "the magazine of sex, politics and protest."
I don't remember the "politics" and the "protest."
Anyway, Bob Guccione, you old dawg, R.I.P.