So you’re an avid porn fan, and over the years you have amassed quite a collection of magazines, videos, films, toys or just about anything that has something to do with sex and porn. Maybe your own porn collection is as vast as that of New Jersey businessman Mark Rotenberg.

One of the United States’ most famous porn collectors, Rotenberg’s personal stash of over 200,000 porn/sex items probably counts as one of the biggest in the world. His collection ranges from erotic playing cards to Victorian-era hardcore to the first ever Playboy with Marilyn Monroe on the cover.

Still, his personal collection, or anyone else’s for that matter, pales in comparison to that of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. Based in San Francisco, California, has the distinction of being the world’s first graduate school to award professional and academic degrees in sexology. And being such, its only fitting that a noble pursuit such as the acquisition of knowledge concerning sexual behavior in all of its aspects have the widest number of resources possible at its disposal.

To date, the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality has more than—count ‘em—three million items in its collection, effectively making it the world’s largest repository of porn and erotica. The number of pornographic films in its stash alone is staggering. With titles that range from “Make Mine Milk” to “The Rites of Uranus”, the films number more than 400,000—more porn than one person could ever see in two lifetimes.

Apart from raunchy skin flicks, the IASHS’ archive, known to the sex and porn industries as, well, “The Archive”, also boasts of books, magazines, sex toys, and virtually anything related to sex and pornography. The whole collection fills 22 warehouses throughout Northern California, the Mother Lode of pornography, so to speak.

Considering the Institute’s policy of never throwing anything away from any of the tax-deductible donations it gets from retired film producers, erotica collectors, even other museums and libraries, its stash is only bound to grow bigger and bigger. In the hands of these dedicated intellectuals, America’s ‘erotic heritage’ is safe, and we could only thank them for it.

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