Free London Blues by Anthony Frewin Page A

enthusiastic breeding units for producing Hitler Youth.
    Charlie describes these books as strokers’ manuals, wankers’ digests and ‘hand books for geezers who want the solution in their fists.’ He also says they are for blokes who like dating handkerchiefs and practising five-finger exercises . He’s a fund of sexual slang and colloquialism.
    There’s something fascinating about these farther shores of ‘vice’. It brings out the voyeur in me.
     
    If the medical shops cater for the needs of the practical man, the man of action, the dirty bookshops, perhaps a dozen in number, cater for the man of imagination. They supply the stuff that gets him soaring in his reveries and showing blue films all night long on the back of his eyelids.
    The windows are always crammed full of American ‘girlie’ magazines. They’re tame enough, glamour stuff like those dreary pin-ups put out by Harrison Marks. You go inside the shop and you’re starting to see nipples now and air-brushed crotches. Hang about here for a while and look serious enough and the manager will ask you if you would like to ‘come out back and see something stronger?’ He lifts one side of the counter and you walk through to the backroom where the real action is. Here rows of photographs are kept wrapped in cellophane in packets of five in long wooden trays. The trays are labelled so you can go straight to your partiality.
    JUVE is old streetwalkers dressed as Girl Guides or in schoolgirl uniforms being rogered by Sir. LES or LEZ is lesbian stuff. FLAGE is flagellation and sado-masochistic material. PERV is girls dressed in rubber and tied up, or a white girl being screwed by a black guy, while STRAIGHT is a white couple doing it missionary style or side by side (but certainly not doggy style). That’s it. Sometimes you may see some BEST[-iality] which demonstrates that a girl and her dog are not to be parted, but you’ll never see any HOMO. You’ll have to go to Paris or Port Said for that. This London stuff is produced by straights for straights.
    The quality of these photographs is awful. The exposure is nearly always right but the lighting is harsh and flatly uniform, rather as if the shots were taken under strip lighting. The poses and composition are as unappealing as the old scrubbers and the fellows who appear in them. They all look as though they were shot in a basement in Paddington in 1945, and, indeed, they could well have been.
    Some of these shops are reputed to have a turnover of£200 or more a week. Of course, the police don’t close them, because most of the police are on the take from them, certainly the Obscene Publications Squad at West End Central who are supposed to deal with them. One of these days this whole story might come out, but I doubt it.
    A few of the shops, like the ‘long shop’ in Old Compton Street, next door to the bomb site, always have a shelf or two of ‘readers’ out in the back. ‘Readers’ are books. As magazines are invariably called ‘books’ by the semi- illiterates who manage and frequent these shops another term had to be conjured up for actual books. Thus ‘readers’, as opposed to the rest of the stock that might be termed ‘lookers’. Readers might be sexological textbooks such as Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Stekel and their modern imitators who have MD or PhD after their (pseudonymous) name and choose to publish their studies of female autoerotic practices (or whatever) through cheap American paperback houses operating out of unlikely addresses, like Cleveland, Ohio. They might be what antiquarian booksellers call curiosa or oeuvres galantes, such as a history of corporal punishment or an anthropological study of female circumcision (with plates, yet) or even some reprinted drollery. They could also be what is known as ‘Soho typescripts ’. These are short stories a few thousand words or so in length churned out on Gestetner duplicating machines and printed on blotting paper. They