In 1970, a nineteen-year-old Dian Hanson couldn’t wait to spend her birthday money on porn. “I bought The Illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. The editors of an adult-book company took the dry, long report and illustrated it with every kind of sex act possible. It was banned shortly thereafter,” Hanson says. Like her good friend Vanessa del Rio, she was “born to porn”—not in front of the lens but behind it. For more than three decades she has cultivated a one-of-a-kind career. One of the preeminent American editors of dirty magazines, she ran such anatomically site-specific publications as Juggs, Leg Show, Tight, and Big Butt, where she directed photo shoots, oversaw layouts, and wrote “girl copy” (those panting, first-person accounts of the models’ deepest desires). For Hanson, filth is no mere job; it is a vocation. She studies her chosen field as diligently as a stockbroker follows the Nikkei.

Six feet tall with straight blond hair that falls nearly to her waist, Hanson, sixty-three, is like a laid-back Cali-girl Amazon. She’s quick, funny, frank, and utterly unshockable. A closet anthropologist, she is endlessly fascinated by (and disarmingly perceptive about) human behavior. She also knows how to work a crowd. “I am a really big ham when I have an audience,” she admits.

Since 2001, she has been plying her trade at Taschen, the German publisher of classy art books and even classier erotica. As the company’s “sexy book editor,” perhaps the only person in the world to hold this title, she has edited the Big Book series (The Big Book of Breasts, The Big Book of Pussy, The Big Penis Book, The Big Book of Legs) as well as tomes dedicated to Tom of Finland, Vanessa del Rio, and Swedish erotica. Recent projects have included The Art of Pin-Up and My Buddy, a collection of homoerotic snapshots of World War II soldiers. She’s currently working on a photo book about Arnold Schwarzenegger. Porn has shaped her and she in turn has redefined it.

—Elina Shatkin

WORKING GIRL

THE BELIEVER: You have the best job title of anyone I know: sexy book editor. How did you go from hard-core porn to artsy erotica?

DIAN HANSON: I was editing Leg Show and Juggs, and Benedikt Taschen was my biggest German fan. He contacted me in 1993 or ‘94 and wanted to meet. He would come to New York and take me out to dinner and say, “When are you going to work for me?” I would say, “Never. I want to keep doing...