Bob Guccione, born Robert Charles Guccione, December 17, 1930, Brooklyn, New York, USA. Founder and publisher (until November 2003, when he resigned) of Penthouse Magazine.

Penthouse Magazine was started in 1965 in England and began to be published in America in 1969. Penthouse was an attempt to compete with Hugh Hefner's "Playboy" on several levels. One approach Guccione took was offering editorial content that was more sensationalistic than Playboy. The magazine's writing was aimed more at the middlebrow reader than Hefner's upscale emphasis, with stories about political issues, government coverups, and scandals.

Another area Guccione pushed the envelope was in the pictorials, where Guccione offered more sexually explicit content than was commonly seen in most aboveground "men's magazines" of the era. Penthouse has also, over the years, featured a number of authorized and unauthorized photos of celebrities such as Madonna and Vanessa Williams. In both cases the photos were taken earlier in their careers and later sold to Penthouse after Madonna and Williams became famous. In Williams' case, this forced her resignation as Miss America in 1994.

The famous "Penthouse Letters" column, which featured readers writing in about their (alleged) sexual experiences, was and remains one of the most popular features of Penthouse, with several books of the "letters" in publication.

Penthouse enjoyed a great deal of success in the 1970s and 1980s, and Guccione used some of this fortune to make movies ("Caligula," 1979, with Malcolm McDowell) and to found Spin Magazine, a music magazine intended to compete with Rolling Stone by being more "edgy" than RS (Guccione's son, Bob Guccione Jr., was given editorship of Spin Magazine).

However, Penthouse was eventually outgunned by Larry Flynt's "Hustler" magazine, which went even farther with both pictorials and editorial content than Guccione was willing to go. The magazine fell into a niche between Playboy's upper-class pretensions and Larry Flynt's no-holds-barred approach, and began to lose the impact it once had. Guccione's efforts to regain sales and get notoriety, which included attempts to get Monica Lewinsky to pose for the magazine and offering the Unabomber a free forum for his views, were not successful in reviving the magazine.

With the rise in online access to erotica and pornography in the 1990s, Penthouse's circulation numbers began to suffer even more. In 2003, General Media (the publishing company for Penthouse) declared bankruptcy, and Guccione himself resigned as chairman and CEO of Penthouse International, Inc. The magazine as of this writing (December 2003) is still in publication and has an online presence.