The Library of Spanking Fiction: Wellred Weekly


Wellred Weekly
Volume 1, Number 7 : April 27, 2012
 
Articles
Items of interest regarding all things spanking

The Rise & Fall of the Spanking Mag
A UK writer's perspective

by Nick Urzdown

Back when I was 20 I worked as a cinema projectionist, a job that I did until I eventually went to university over a decade later. Showing films left me with plenty of free time as the projector was whirring away to do other things and I ended up borrowing a manual typewriter and writing a 5,000 word pornographic short story. What I really needed though was a niche; something that I could write about effortlessly, and without the need to pad out the pages with superfluous text. Spanking seemed like the obvious choice, since it was a theme that I was interested in anyway and could wax lyrical about. I wrote a story and asked a tame merchant to buy it.

Around this time the country had liberalised, and fears of prosecution had eased. Thus it was possible to produce a magazine on an offset-litho machine because a print run of 1,000 copies or so made it economically viable. The legitimate wholesalers were still not willing to carry those titles, but several shops in each provincial city would order up a few dozen copies every month to sell. The second-hand shops, of which there were dozens in every city, would then take the magazines from the customers on a half back deal and sell them on. Those shops also dealt with the local typescript vendors, but as more and more printed works became available the market for the typescripts dried up.

One such professionally printed job was a small magazine called Mentor which only ran under that name for a total of four issues, and then had to change its name in a hurry owing to a legal threat from another magazine that had the same title. Brainstorming ideas for a new name, someone came up with the idea of the Roman god of the home and hearth, a two-headed being who looks backward and forward at the same time. His name is Janus.


In 1971, shortly after the name was changed, the magazine produced a spanking special and from that moment on the world of CP fiction was never going to be the same again. The issue had sold out, leading one of the people involved in the magazine to utter the immortal line, “Every issue has to be a spanking special!"

Unusually, and for reasons that are still unclear to me, Janus was actually run by spanking aficionados rather than the usual collection of drunken hacks who normally oversee a pornographer's output. The owner was a typical Soho hard man, but so long as the magazine was making good money he was happy to leave the staff to their own devices. The money did roll in as by the early 1970s, with no real competition around, Janus had a monthly circulation of about 10,000 copies. It was also cordially loathed by most of the hack writers in Britain. The problem was that Janus had its own circle of writers and breaking into that rarefied group was next to impossible - especially for someone from the provinces.

Following the death of the editor of Janus, Alan Van Okker, an attempt was made at a coup by the magazine's writers. An adult film maker named George Harrison Marks was brought in as a stop-gap editor but he had little interest in spanking publications, or the 'fladge' as it was referred to in the trade. The writers went off to set up a magazine of their own which ran under the name of Phoenix for some years, but it never reached the heights of Janus which seemed to go from strength to strength.

Meanwhile, Harrison Marks brought out about half a dozen issues of what he called New Janus which he filled with his photographs and whatever unpublished stories were hanging around the office. He was famous for his pornographic films and photographs, but once he realised just how profitable the spanking market was he scampered off to start Kane, his own competitor to Janus, which by then had reverted back to its old name.


Even if all this had not happened Janus was going to face competition sooner or later. The advantage that it had over its rivals had been that most of them were poorly produced, small circulation efforts that paid their writers a pittance. Breaking the Janus monopoly meant that lots of new titles began to appear and for the writers the Golden Age of the 1980s was about to dawn.

The latter part of the 1970s saw any number of porn merchants trying to get a slice of the Janus pie. Magazines with titles long forgotten appeared, enjoyed a brief spell on the shelves, and than vanished like the early morning dew. However, two factors came together in the the very early 1980s to ensure that the monopoly was going to collapse. The first was the feud that broke out within the Janus organisation that I've already described, the second involved the willingness of the wholesalers to carry adult titles.

Retailer WH Smith had always refused to stock Janus, but that policy changed in the late 1970s. What that meant was that other publishers could use an already existing distribution system if they could get a title up and running. Until then getting Janus outside London involved a shop buying the magazine each month and waiting for those issues to arrive by parcel post. The change of policy by WH Smith meant that anybody who could guarantee a set number of sales each month could pretty much be sure of their title being carried by Smiths. The London porn merchants hastened to set up their titles.

By the early 1980s Blushes, Kane and Roue were all competing with Janus for the national 'fladge' readership. Many provincial titles also sprang up, most using a more sophisticated version of the old duplicating technology that had produced the original typescripts. They circulated in their region and by post to subscribers outside it.


As regards remuneration Janus always paid the best, giving its writers about £25 per thousand words. The other titles paid £20 and the provincials about £15. Any half decent hack who could stay sober long enough to string a sentence together could be virtually guaranteed a regular income.

After they had overcome their little local difficulties Janus were once again hard to break into as a writer, but the other titles took whatever we chose to give them. Hiring a model, studio and photographer cost a lot of money but paying £100 to fill three or four pages worked out a lot cheaper - and could be used with stock photos taken from the archives - and that padded out the story to another page at least. The situation became so ridiculous that I can remember writing a tale for Roue and being paid £100 for the five thousand word epic. I then sold the same story to a Sheffield publisher who gave me £75 for it. Finally the story was sold yet again for £25 to a man who ran a spanking newsletter which included a story every month. Of course, I had to agree to change the story slightly and then break it down into five chapters, that then ran one a month in the newsletter, but it was still the same tale at the end of the day.

The introduction of personal computers only made the work easier. The writers discovered that a word processor package meant that a story could have names, locations and descriptions added to a manuscript to personalise it. So began the short-lived but highly lucrative trade of personalised manuscripts. The punter would supply the names that he wanted, along with some other details. Half an hour later all that had been added to the mix and a story was printed up to be posted to the punter next morning.

What could possibly happen to bring an end to this halcyon world? The internet, that's what happened. The trade in magazines just dried up as more and more people joined the computer age in the 1990s. I can remember speaking to a publisher in about 1995 with a view to writing some stories for him and he candidly admitted that the most that he could pay was £10 per thousand words and he was only offering that for old time's sake and because he knew that I could write. He pulled all his material off the web, an activity that involved hours of plodding through the turgid prose that enthusiastic amateurs had written - but when he eventually found something decent then it would be nicked for free. The porn trade - don't you just love it?

As writers, we had a good run down the years and that Golden Age had to come to an end at some time. Funnily enough, I have now started blogging, an activity which combines both publishing and writing, so perhaps a new Golden Age is on the horizon?


Nick Urzdown is the author of A Spanking Good Life




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