Long, long ago, in the year 1965, there was no explicit pornography. There was the odd grainy stag film, the occasional French postcard, the rare Cuban chapbook or homemade Polaroid, but the glossy professional color pornography ubiquitous to modern society did not exist. The man who changed all that was Berth Milton of Stockholm, with his audacious little digest, Private. He and Private were directly responsible for Swedish Parliament’s decision to treat sexually explicit materials as protected free speech, leading to the abolition of obscenity laws over most of northern Europe. With its smiling, exuberantly uninhibited models, Private created a fantasy of Sweden as the most liberated country on earth, a sexual wonderland that enchanted men around the globe. Publisher Milton was the magazine’s sole photographer, so the Private paradise was very much his personal dream. Genius and tyrant, he insisted on only the best for his magazine, rising in the 1970s to become the Hugh Hefner of Hardcore. And now everything is condensed in these tiny cute books by Taschen.