London Life 02
"London Life" was the most important fetishist magazine in the world during the 1930`s. It was distributed and available literally worldwide. Early American fetish producers advertised, read and contributed to its content. Its style and influence were the end product from the conglomeration of varied competing magazines such as "Half Holiday", "Illustrated Tid - Bits", "Modern Society" and "Photo Bits".
"London Life" started as "Penny Illustrated" in 1861, it began merging with its competitors in 1884, the final merger being with "Photo Bits" in 1926. Many of its pre-merger competitors were cited as containing "lurid" and fetishistic material. The main competitor to contain such material was "Photo Bits", which was regularly doing so as early as 1910 ( a 1911 article explicitly references Krafft-Ebing`s Psychopathia Sexualis ).
"Photo Bits was published from 1898 to 1916 and was a part of a line of publications that eventually merged with London Life in 1926. The look of Photo Bits is distinctly Victorian: its pages are filled with images of full figured women in hour glass shaped long dresses and men clad in top hats and with the exception of leather footwear and gloves, its erotic representations are in the style characteristic of the nineteenth century. However a review of Photo Bits provides much evidence that the magazine was a popular culture product located in the transitional period between the antecedent (19th century) and the modern eras of SM & Fetishism.
Structurally, many Photo Bits conventions are found later in London Life. These include regular features such as a reader correspondence section serialized fiction, cartoons , artwork, photographs (including nudes) and international advertisements. There were also columns written by regular columnists attuned to the bizarre world in 1909-1911 these were " The Amorist " and Cosmopolite." These columnists maintained an on going dialog with their readers about variety of Kinky topics.
"The final merger with "Photo Bits" in 1926 resulted in the style and content of, what was to be, the "London Life" of the 1930`s. "London Life " as the Magazine name was first used in 1918, its first fetishistic content was published in 1923 and continued until 1941, when it`s London office was hit by a German bomb, destroying machinery and all the files.
Much of the content of "London Life" was not fetishistic in nature, with articles appearing on "Fashions, Fads & Fancies", Movie Stars, news and gossip.
"However "Photo Bits" mainstays such as Shoe/Boot Fetishism and Female Domination were present in almost every issue."
Subjects covered included human ponies, body piercings and rubber fetishism.
In the correspondence section there were letters from readers such as "Dominating Catherine","Rubber Lined" and "Marquis of the Old Regime".
Advertisements for costumes , fetish equipment and photos appeared throughout the magazine. It was Editorial policy at "London Life" not to reveal correspondents addresses. However, many of the advertisers did not have this policy and would give referrals that put interested parties in touch with each other.
It was through such a referral in the late 1930`s that John Coutts ( Later publisher of Bizarre Magazine ), then living in Australia, made contact with members of the American subculture in Chicago and New York.
(Section Paraphrases Bienvenu 1998 pp 51-55)
See also [ Yva Richard ]
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