Donations Provide Widener Library Full Set of Playboys

Six weeks after asking in the University Gazette for missing copies of Playboy Magazine, Widener Library has a complete set of every issue the magazine has published since its founding in 1953.

The missing issues were replaced through donations from faculty members and administrators that came in response to the Gazette request.

'Gratifying'

The response to the request has been "quite gratifying," Heather Cole, a Widener librarian, said yesterday, adding that the library now has many duplicate issues that it will give to nearby libraries that need them.

"These magazines are kept mostly for their literary value--after all, that is their primary lasting value, while their naughty pictures are of secondary value," Pawel J. Depta, a reference librarian at Widener, said yesterday. Depta said Widener has no other periodicals that could be considered pornographic.

Phillip Gay, a graduate student in Sociology, has been using the issues of Playboy for his dissertation on magazine fiction and social change. Gay's work will consider the portrayal of women, blacks and social values in various magazines he has selected. The dissertation will include an analysis of time trends in these magazines as a function of readership.

Gay's work with Playboy entails examination of fiction, interviews and pictures. Of all the magazines he examined, Gay said he found Playboy to present an unusually strong correlation among its different departments in their portrayals of social values. He gave as an example the inclusion of a fiction story concerning life in the ghetto with an interview with Eldridge Cleaver