Vintage Erotica

[Colleen Thomas]

I have written a few period pieces and am working on another set on the home front in W.W. II. A kind fan sent me a sampling of her vintage erotica collection. Mostly buxom gals in their unmentionables posing, but a few hard core shots. Since my interest was more in what a lady might have on under her dress this was really a thoughtful gesture, and I thank her, but it also left me wondering about vintage written erotica.

A quick check on google revealed a lot of interesting sites, but all were devoted to pictorial erotica. I ended up wondering what erotic writers were writing about during the period. I know the English & Americans both had sections of their intellignece aparatus in England that turned out "black" propaganda. Much of it aimed at the sexual appetites of top Nazi's. But it isn't very erotic to read.

Does anyone have any idea what our literary forebears in telling erotic stories were up to during this time period?

-Colly

 

[Guest]

Colly, Anais Nin was writing erotica throughout that era. There are many sites dedicated to her and her work. I think she's a very good (and ground breaking) example of the erotic writing movement throughout the early half of the twentieth century.

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Women's History
Anaïs (Anais) Nin

(February 21, 1903 - January 14, 1977)
Full birth name: Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell
Anais Nin was born in France. Her father was the Spanish composer Joaquin Nin, her mother Cuban, French and Danish. She moved to the United States in 1914 after her father deserted the family, where she attended Catholic schools, dropped out of school, worked as a model and dancer and returned to Europe in 1923.

Anais Nin studied psychoanalysis with Otto Rank and briefly practiced as a lay therapist in New York. She was a patient of Carl Jung for a time as well.

Finding it difficult to get her erotic stories published, Anais Nin helped found Siana Editions in France in 1935. By 1939 and the outbreak of World War II she returned to New York, where she became a figure in the Greenwich Village crowd.

An obscure literary figure for most of her life, when her journals -- kept since 1931 -- began to be published in 1966, she entered the public eye. The ten volumes of The Diary of Anaïs Nin have remained popular. These are more than simple diaries; each volume has a theme, and were likely written with the intent that they later be published. Letters she exchanged with intimate friends, including Henry Miller, have also been published. The popularity of the diaries brought interest in her previously-published novels. The Delta of Venus and Little Birds, originally written in the 1940s, were published after her death (1977, 1979).

Anais Nin is known, as well, for her lovers, who included Henry Miller, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal and Otto Rank. She was married to Hugh Guiler of New York who tolerated her affairs and a second, bigamous marriage to Rupert Cole in California.

The ideas of Anais Nin about "masculine" and "feminine" natures have influenced that part of the feminist movement known as "difference feminism." She disassociated herself late in her life from the more political forms of feminism, believing that self-knowledge through journaling was the source of personal liberation.

From http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_nin_anais.htm

Lou

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Colly, Anais Nin was writing erotica throughout that era. There are many sites dedicated to her and her work. I think she's a very good (and ground breaking) example of the erotic writing movement throughout the early half of the twentieth century.

Lou

Thanks Lou Lou, I'll check her out

I am still looking on google, found one site with steam letters home & to soldiers

-Colly

 

[Guest]

Colly, this is a good site. It also includes excerpts from her diary, like this one:

Volume 3, 1939-1944

"Bijou felt heavy and drowsy, but not unconscious. Her eyelids felt heavy, and she could not make the effort to open her eyes. But she felt her dress so lightly lifted that she could not be certain. It could have been a breeze. Lifted by a breeze. No human touch. The air was lifting her skirt it seemed, and exposing her silk-clad legs. Where the stockings ended, she felt a light touch. As if a feather had been brushed against her skin. The touch was so light that it was as if the skin had a thousand tiny eyes and the touch had lifted their eyelids, and light and heat fell upon them, waves, currents, vibrations of response. Each tiny cell instead of contracting at the touch, expanded and became twice as sensitive. She never moved. Her deepest fear was that the hand should stop, grow timid, withdraw. She wanted to move, so as to place a leg a little more sideways, separate from the other so that the fingers could reach the inner skin which was more sensitive than the skin of the thighs.
The skin of her eyelids was invaded with a reddish sunset light. It was as if the skin cells had carried red wine, first to her eyes, and then through her neck down to her breasts. The tips of the breasts acknowledged the current of warmth. It could not be a man's hand. It must be silk, a feather, the hair of a soft animal like a rabbit. How slowly it worked its way upward, as if knowing it must wait for all the little cells to awaken, and follow, cumulatively aroused, and like rivulets, foaming toward the center, the edge of small waves of pleasure adding one to the other , increasing as the hand reached a softer and softer skin.

Woman's pearl was the center of this electrical storm, a hushed storm, whirling, wrapped in cotton but incandescent, streaks of lightening, the flesh becoming a lightening conductor, iridescent with light, striking gongs of pleasure; one, two, three."
This is not from the erotic story The Basque and Bijou, but an entry from the diary vol. 3, 1939-1944, page 58.

The Diary of Anais Nin

Volume 3: 1939-1944 (1969), Harvest Books Paperback 1983

The site:
http://www.anais-nin.de/

She was an amazing writer.

Lou

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Well, I can tell you what my old man had in his top drawer hidden behind his socks.

He had a pamphlet-book that was the story of a a private school mistress who brings 2 of her charges to the Narrator to learn about sex. There's a lot of looking and touching, and then the girls are allowed to beat him off, and finally he has sex with their teacher while the girls watch. I remember the language being very proper, the spelling being British, and a lot of people "spending" rather than coming. It was all very tame by our standards, with a kind of happy, party atmosphere: naughty rather than really dirty.

He also had a deck of playing cards that showed grainy photos of women from the '30's, it looked like. A lot of stockings rolled down below the knees, fat women and skinny guys wearing masks. There were BJ's, but I'm pretty sure there was no cunnilingus at all, because I remember being horrified years later when I first learned about it.

---dr.M.

 

[gauchecritic]

1930s - 1950s. Tijuana Bible.

Black and white comic books with stories of screen stars (and cartoons) in decidedly hot encounters. I don't know why but they seem to sum up the erotica pre-60s for me.

Then of course there was D H Lawrence.

Gauche

 

[Colleen Thomas]

1930s - 1950s. Tijuana Bible.

Black and white comic books with stories of screen stars (and cartoons) in decidedly hot encounters. I don't know why but they seem to sum up the erotica pre-60s for me.

Then of course there was D H Lawrence.

Gauche

I've seen some of the Tijuana bibles. Fore runners of our far more explicit fare these days

From what I have found so far, I am getting the idea that pin up artists were the most daring of the era's smutsters.

-Colly

 

[herecomestherain]

Colleen, I know it's not written erotica but you may like to take a look at these films from cultepics, at the site you'll need to scroll down past the horror section to Vintage Erotica.

I own the 1950's one and it's intriguing to say the least. Grainy black and white footage, 15 mins stag films, interspersed with snippets of risque burlesque. It's interesting because somehow we think of ourselves and our sexual activities as so modern...huh there's nothing new under the sun! Shaving scenes, dildo use, S&M all there in glorious black and white. I'm tempted to buy the 30's and 40's DVD just for the lingerie!


Cultepics.com

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Thanks so much for the site. I can't afford to purchase anything right now, but it' sin my favorites for when I get out from under aall these bills

-Colly

 

[Virtual_Burlesque]

Ms Thomas,

You might find something of interest, in, or linked to World Sex Records

For example:

From the 16th century, Pietro Aretino has been termed the “greatest erotic writer in Christendom.”

Henry Cleland's "Fanny Hill, or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," first published in London in 1749, wins the title of most famous erotic novel, hands down.

"Ideal Marriage" by Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde (1873-1937) first published in 1926, was perhaps the best selling sex technique book of them all.

Perhaps the most famous woman publisher of erotica in the nineteenth-century was Mary Wilson, who produced a wide variety of literature.

In a seventeenth-century Chinese tale Jou-pu-t'uan, there is an account of a penis transplant, or, perhaps more accurately, a penis graft.

 

[Boxlicker101]

1930s - 1950s. Tijuana Bible.

Black and white comic books with stories of screen stars (and cartoons) in decidedly hot encounters. I don't know why but they seem to sum up the erotica pre-60s for me.


I remember these from the fifties. They were called eight-pagers because they had eight pages. I lived in a small town and they weren't very common there. Probably more in the bigger cities.

I've also seen some stag movies, as they were called then, from the thirties and thereabouts. Felatio was common but cunnilingus was avoided by the men. It was funny to me, who loves eating pussy, to see men keeping their faces as far away from the women's pussies as they could.

I would have to quibble about "Most famous erotic novel". "Most famous" is very subjective. Personally, I would vote for "Lady Chatterley's Lover".

 

[Virtual_Burlesque]

... "Most famous" is very subjective. Personally, I would vote for "Lady Chatterley's Lover"...

Feel free to quibble

The "Fanny Hill" choice as “most famous” comes from World Sex Records

But I could defend "Fanny Hill" as having had the more time to be "most famous" in – more than 250 years, since 1749.

"Lady Chatterley's Lover" has only had 76 years since first published in 1928 (limited edition) a bowdlerised edition in 1932, and finally an unexpurgated American edition published in 1959.

I would agree that "Lady Chatterley's Lover" is one of the most famous censored books.