The Library of Spanking Fiction: Wellred Weekly
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Articles
Items of interest regarding all things spanking
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Who Was Will Henry? Who the hell was Will Henry? He is mentioned every now and then in the library forum, in the chat room, in the comments. But so far no one has really explained who he was and what he had to do with TTWD. The short answer is that he was a writer. His real name was Will Deer and he was a lawyer in a suburb of Chicago. He wrote pulp fiction in the 60's, 70's and up through the mid 80's. He died in the fall of 1986. Before explaining his contribution to our art form, a little history is in order. Before the internet, before DVD's, even before VCR's, there were books. In the mid 60's erotic media consisted essentially of magazines, grainy 8mm film and books. Books were sold in "adult bookstores" which were located in the seedier parts of the downtown cores of major American cities. "Dirty books" were big back then, and these crummy porn shops had racks and racks of them. At that time the spanking fetish was little understood by the producers of mainstream porn who furnished the content for adult bookstores. It seemed to be lumped in with "sadism and masochism" or "bondage", stuff featuring mainly female domination. In New York City there were the Nutrix pamphlets and other very short booklets that featured spanking stories and a few drawings or cheesy pictures. Spanking content in magazines was rare and poorly presented, if at all. You were just as likely to see a photo of some crazed misogynist whacking some woman with a tennis racquet or a frying pan as an actual spanking, yet they called it "spanking". I actually remember a magazine I once saw called "Hit and Fun". Will Henry was an oasis in a desert of porn that displayed no understanding of what spankophiles wanted. He was one of us. He wrote under the names Will Henry and William St Cyr. There were several other pseudonyms. Some of his more famous titles were: Spankmanship, Suburban Spanking, Spanking Stewardesses, Modern Spanking and The Headmaster. Many of his books were actually collections of "case studies" which were first person accounts of wife spanking, sorority initiations, spanking clubs, and family discipline. These read a lot like the "letters" featured in magazines like "Mr.", which are here in the library. Some of these, I suspect, were actually penned by Mr. Henry himself. He tended toward M/F but did include a good bit of F/M content as well. The following passage from The Passionate Prisoners is typical: With little difficulty, Dale managed to pull his attractive victim into position over his knees, her long, nylon-clad legs up on the bed and in full view. Her girlishly buxom, pantie-clad bottom wriggled anxiously over his lap,... Here is an F/M scene from the same work: From the beginning, Arthur was kept under extremely strict discipline. There can be little doubt that his Aunt Helen was a sadist. For the slightest infraction of her rules, Arthur was soundly spanked with the hand and hairbrush. He was always spanked on the completely bare bottom, and his aunt did not even permit him to prepare himself. Instead, his aunt personally lowered his trousers and shorts for him, even after he was a mature young man well into his teens. Henry's books were sold by several publishing houses including Satan Press and Eros Goldstripe. They were also pirated by many others and republished under altered titles. Henry was famous for writing very evocative scenes that got right to the heart of the spankophile fantasy. He never dwelled on plot or characterization, preferring instead to paint lurid word pictures of spanking scenes frequently followed by sex. His novels featured multiple characters and scenes, usually one pairing per chapter. He'd describe a scene then quickly move to something else, like a different pair of characters. His emphasis was on home and school spanking and while there was a bit of bondage, he never strayed very far into BDSM. He pioneered many themes which readers now recognize as familiar. For example, the male disciplinarian in an apartment shared by several females is, to my knowledge, his invention. I've used it several times as have others. He was probably alone in featuring sorority and club initiation scenes in both his "case studies" and novels. The thing that distinguished Henry from other writers of his era like Paul Little, Gerda Mundinger and Joe Weiss, was his emphasis on setting. His books were nearly always set in a suburban late 1950's-early 1960's America. They most always dealt with domestic or school discipline. Today it's like reading a spanking story set on the old prime time soap opera "Peyton Place", or in an episode of "Father Knows Best" or even in Mayberry RFD. The characters are ordinary people in the heartland of country America or suburbia. The milieu has a veneer of mom and apple pie innocence, under which the reader often finds a smouldering sexuality fuelled by consensual and semi-consensual spanking. Husbands spank wives, girlfriends spank boyfriends, room-mates spank each other, high school athletic clubs have paddling initiations. Sometimes wife swapping clubs form that feature spanking. You don't find exotic locations, New York chic, or elements of BDSM in Henry's works (except occasional bondage), but you do find spanking and sex - and plenty of it. The good news is that today his novels are available in e-book form from Olympiapress. And all for the princely sum of $1. Happy reading. 26 comments
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