About Penthouse

Penthouse

Penthouse is a men's magazine that was founded in London, England, by the American publisher Bob Guccione, with the first British issue appearing in March 1965. It was created as a more provocative rival to Playboy, combining nude photography that was more revealing than that of its competitors with investigative journalism, fiction and interviews. The British edition was the original Penthouse: an American edition followed in September 1969 and became the flagship of Guccione's publishing empire, but the title's first success was made in Britain and Europe.

The British edition folded in 1999, unable to compete with the internet, and a revival attempted in 2001 was short-lived. The American edition continued in print, with diminishing frequency, until its last regular issue in 2023, and the brand survives under Los Angeles-based Penthouse World Media as a digital publication, with the owner stating in early 2026 that a return to print was still planned.

Founding in London

Bob Guccione was an American who had worked in London as a cartoonist before launching Penthouse there in March 1965. The magazine began on a shoestring: resources were so limited that it took Guccione twenty months to produce his first twelve nominally monthly issues. An advance promotional brochure was confiscated by the British Post Office on the grounds that it was lewd material sent through the mail; Guccione successfully appealed, and the episode gave the new magazine a valuable windfall of publicity. The first issue sold out within two days.

Its symbol was a skeleton key, rendered as three keys in some applications. By the late 1960s Penthouse was firmly established in the British market — Guccione himself called it the biggest-selling quality magazine in British publishing history, and the historian of erotic publishing Dian Hanson described it as the best-selling erotic magazine in Europe. It sold well on the Continent, notably in France, as well as in the United Kingdom.

Photographic Style

Because he lacked resources, Guccione personally photographed most of the models for the early issues. Without professional photographic training, he applied his knowledge of painting to the work, developing the diffused, soft-focus look that became one of the magazine's trademarks; a single shoot could take him several days. He continued to photograph features, including the Penthouse Pet of the Month, through much of his career.

The pictorials were more explicit than those in most openly sold men's magazines of the era. Penthouse was the first such magazine to show female pubic hair, then full-frontal nudity, and eventually more explicit imagery. Its centre models were branded as Penthouse Pets, and the magazine also published authorised and unauthorised photographs of celebrities, including Madonna and Vanessa Williams, taken earlier in their careers and sold to the magazine after they became famous.

Editorial Content and Writers

Against Playboy's upscale consumer emphasis, Guccione offered editorial content that was more sensational and far more investigative. The magazine published stories about government cover-ups and scandals, and writers such as Seymour Hersh, James Dale Davidson and Ernest Volkman exposed corruption at high levels of the United States government. In 1975 Brandeis University named Guccione Publisher of the Year in recognition of a series of Penthouse articles on the poor treatment of Vietnam veterans.

The contributor list across the magazine's history was unusually distinguished for its genre, including Isaac Asimov, James Baldwin, T. C. Boyle, Cameron Crowe, Don DeLillo, Alan Dershowitz, Nat Hentoff, Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Mickey Spillane, Ben Stein, Studs Terkel, Gore Vidal and Dr Ruth Westheimer. Fiction, interviews and reporting sat alongside the pictorials as a deliberate part of the Penthouse formula inherited from, and sharpened against, the Playboy model.

The American Edition and the Rivalry with Playboy

Reports that British Penthouse was outselling Playboy among American troops in Vietnam helped persuade Guccione to launch in the United States, where the first American issue appeared in September 1969. He moved his operations to New York and advertised the challenge to Hugh Hefner directly, in terms of going rabbit hunting. The ensuing escalation in explicitness between the two titles during the 1970s was widely dubbed the Pubic Wars in the press, and by the late 1970s Penthouse had overtaken Playboy in sales for a period of several years.

An April 2002 New York Times report quoted Guccione as saying that Penthouse had grossed between 3.5 and 4 billion dollars over the thirty-year life of the company. Guccione assembled a wider empire under General Media, including the science magazine Omni and the health magazine Longevity, and became one of the richest publishers in America, though his private life at his large Manhattan residence was reported to be notably sedate compared with Hefner's at the Playboy Mansion.

Controversies and Litigation

The September 1984 American issue became the magazine's most notorious. It published nude photographs of Vanessa Williams, taken before she won the Miss America title, and the resulting scandal forced her to relinquish her crown. The same issue's centrefold featured Traci Lords at the start of her adult film career; it was later revealed that she had been underage, sixteen, when she posed. Both episodes brought the magazine intense national attention and lasting reputational damage.

Penthouse's investigative journalism also produced major litigation. Its March 1975 article on the La Costa resort in California, by Jeff Gerth and Lowell Bergman, prompted a libel suit seeking 522 million dollars from the resort's developers and associates. A jury absolved the magazine in 1982, and the case was settled in December 1985 before a retrial, with each side issuing statements; total litigation costs were estimated at more than 20 million dollars. The magazine was also a target of campaigners: in December 1984 a group of radical feminists began a civil disobedience campaign, tearing up copies in shops, and in 1986 the Meese Commission on Pornography led many newsstands and convenience stores to drop the title.

The British Edition's Later Years and PH.UK

In Britain, the original edition continued as a monthly while the brand's centre of gravity sat in New York. A distinctive attempt to revive its fortunes came in 1997, when the British version was rebranded as PH.UK under editor Tom Hilditch and relaunched as a middle-shelf magazine for adults, hiring fashion photographers such as Corinne Day, known for The Face, to merge sex and fashion imagery, with celebrity interviews and coverage of sexual politics. The experiment attracted considerable press interest but did not significantly increase sales, and PH.UK closed in late 1998.

The British edition itself folded in 1999, its publisher unable to compete with the internet. An attempt to revive the UK edition in 2001 was short-lived, bringing the original Penthouse's British print history to an end thirty-six years after its London launch.

Decline of the Guccione Empire

The wider business declined through the late 1990s. In 1999 Penthouse sold several automotive titles from its Peterson portfolio, raising 33 million dollars, but Omni and Longevity lost close to 100 million dollars between them. Guccione's losses also included an estimated 17.5 million dollars on the 1979 film Caligula, which he financed. On 12 August 2003 General Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the magazine was put up for sale that October, and on 13 November 2004 Guccione resigned as chairman and chief executive of the parent company, ending his era. Guccione died in 2010, aged 79.

The American magazine had meanwhile changed direction: from 1997 to 2004 it published hardcore content, a move that drove away advertisers and is widely regarded as accelerating its decline. Under new ownership from the January 2005 issue it returned to softcore content, but circulation remained below 350,000, and further bankruptcies followed in 2013 and 2018 before the brand was bought at auction in June 2018 by WGCZ Ltd for 11.2 million dollars and later spun off as Penthouse World Media.

International Editions

At its height Penthouse was published in numerous national editions under franchise. Most have since closed, including the Australian edition, published from 1984 to 2022, and the French edition, which ran from 1985 to 1998 with a brief return in 2001–2002. As of the mid-2020s, the German print edition, published since 1980, was listed as still in publication, and the American edition continued digitally. In the United States the frequency of print declined steadily — eleven issues a year in 2009, ten in 2017, six in 2019 and five in 2020 — until the fourth issue of 2023 became the last regular print issue.

Legacy

Penthouse began as a London magazine and became one of the most commercially successful men's titles of the twentieth century, reshaping the competitive boundaries of mainstream erotic publishing through its rivalry with Playboy and publishing investigative journalism and fiction of genuine distinction alongside its pictorials. Its British origin is now often overshadowed by its American fame, but the record is clear: the formula was devised in London, proven in the British and European markets, and only then exported to the United States. The brand's survival in digital form, and its owner's stated intention to restore it to print, keep the name Guccione launched in 1965 in the public eye more than sixty years on.