Underling has an interesting blog post about BDSM pornography in the days before the internet made it widespread and easily available.
….I remember occasional visits to the seedy back rooms of certain London bookshops. There I rubbed shoulders with fellow perverts (perhaps some of you among them!), all of us studiously avoiding eye contact while waiting with barely concealed impatience for access to the spanko shelves…
From Underling’s post entitled ‘In the back room’
I was fortunate, in that the window between me being old enough to actually purchase porn and the internet becoming a ubiquitous presence was only a year or two. But for a short period of time in the early 90’s, during my college years, I did do a bit of furtive shopping of my own. The magazines I purchased in that time were treasured and well thumbed possessions. So when I stumbled across the image below, despite the late of watermark, I instantly recognized it as one from the Cruella family of magazines. Specifically a magazine I’d owned called Goddess number 16.
However, unlike Underling, I had been spared the need to trawl around seedy shops in Soho to acquire it. I was saved by the strangest little shop I have ever encountered. In ’94 I was working in a small British seaside town during my summer break from college. A few hundred yards from my lodgings was an old fashioned newsagents, run by an old Indian gentleman and his extended family. It was a tiny corner shop, square in shape, with just a single counter against one wall, and three magazine racks covering the other walls. It looked like it had been frozen in time since the 1950’s. And yet it carried the largest collection of pornographic magazines, and in particular BDSM and fetish magazines, that I’ve ever seen. Everything was there: Janus, Februs, Kane, Cruella, Goddess, Victoria, Obey, etc. He even carried magazine special editions and spanking novels. For a young and nervous femdom aficionado it was like a little piece of pornographic heaven.*
I’ve no idea if the owner of the shop was actually a fan of kinky porn, or just a fan of the higher profit margins it commanded. But whatever the reason, God bless him for it.
* Apart from those times when he put his younger daughters to work in the shop. Then it became a place to purchase chewing gum whilst studious avoiding looking at the enormous wall of explicit pornographic material.
The image is obviously from the Divine Bitches site, although I’m afraid I don’t know the specific shoot. If anyone can help me out with that, then leave a comment and I’ll update the post accordingly.
