Dian Hanson – A Life In Porno Publishing: Taschen's sexy books editor tells us her remarkable story (NSFW)

It’s difficult to think of TASCHEN without thinking of breasts. Though the internationally celebrated German publisher has achieved much in its 33-year lifespan – making fine art affordable to a global audience, raising the profile of comic book art beyond simple childish pulp, not to mention smashing records for producing the most expensive printed works in the history of publishing – they’re still celebrated for their shepherding of erotica and pornographic material into the mainstream. Images that once belonged in a seedy back-room bookstore are now glorified in the luxurious pages of expensive hardback books. Even in the modern era of pornographic ubiquity, nobody else out there has the audacity to produce a £1,000 homage to a 1970s porn star. But TASCHEN does. The company was originally set up as a vehicle for Benedikt Taschen to publish his extensive collection of comics but it’s grown and diversified as his tastes and interests have changed. Now, though he remains responsible for the reactive steer of his enterprise – creating extraordinarily expensive volumes to satisfy his whims regardless of their profitability – he’s got experts on-hand to make sure that every niche field the company explores is maintained with due care and attention. Dian Hanson handles the breasts. Actually, Dian handles all the body parts. In her role as TASCHEN’s Sexy Book Editor she’s published volumes on breasts, bottoms and penises as wellas erotic photography, pin-up history and some exquisite pencil drawings of hulking gents in uniform enjoying each other’s company in an intensely physical fashion. She also knows more than anyone about the military’s penchant for nudity during the Second World War (more of which later). Picked up by TASCHEN in the early 1990s, Dian was relentlessly pursued by Benedikt, who badgered her for a number of years before she eventually agreed to join his ranks. “Around 1993 or 1994 I was contacted by a secretary in his office,” Dian remembers. “She said that ‘Mr Benedikt Taschen is going to be visiting the USA and he’s going to have dinner with you. You will select the restaurant and the time and you will contact me and tell me when.’ There was no possibility of refusal. “I’d heard of him slightly from a couple of my photographers who’d done books with him. So I called one of them and asked what he was like, and she told me he was this very decadent, kinda bored German, and I thought ‘Ah jeez.’ So I picked this restaurant entirely staffed by Asian transsexuals and met him there.” Given her history, it’s not really surprising that Dian failed to be intimidated by her future employer. She’d already spent over 20 years forging herself an illustrious career in the adult entertainment industry that came about almost completely by accident. “My early days were in magazines which started back around 1976. I was working as a respiratory therapist in a hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I was in my very early twenties and met a man there who – I don’t want to give him too much attention or publicity because he’s such an asshole – I began going out with. He ran a little advertising agency in Allentown and one of his clients was a man who had a string of adult bookstores. “ Hustler magazine had just come out and this man knew Larry Flynt and wanted to make a magazine that would be a rival to them. He didn’t know anyone who could produce such a thing so he turned to his ad man who assured him he could make a better magazine – and since I was going out with this fellow we got charged with making it.” Dian took to publishing in the same way she’d taken to respiratory therapy; with no credentials or past experience, just an unrelenting belief that she could get things done. “I learned to do everything on the job and pretty much just made my way through life that way. When I was living in Pennsylvania I came across ads for work in hospitals – I come from a medical family – and I thought ‘Oh, this might be fine to go and work in a hospital.’ I just had no compunctions and this sort of absurd belief in myself. “So I’d go to the hospital and say ‘Yes of course I know about respiratory therapy’ and I’d get the job and sort of madly try to learn everything I could, completely confident that I could do it really well. And in fact I did. It was the same thing with publishing; I just came in and began writing and editing, just believing in my ability to pick photos and direct layout.” This kind of freedom within publishing sounds completely alien to most, but the porn community were much less stuffy than their mainstream counterparts. There were a large number of hippies working in the industry at the time which, coupled with relaxed obscenity laws, left a wide open field for entrepreneurial pornographers to carve out a niche for themselves. It was a time of challenging the limits of acceptability and printing things that nobody would have dared to print before. The market was entirely new and people had tastes for