The recession that gave birth to the Erotic Review

Rowan Pelling on the halcyon days of the enterprise that brought the world the Illustrated Book of Bottoms and poshtotty.com

Pornography was once believed to be recession proof, but, alas for entrepreneurial eroticists, that may no longer be the case. In April the US magazine Variety reported that the sex industry ‘has suddenly gone flaccid… DVD porn is down between 10 per cent and 30 per cent.’ Meanwhile Playboy reported dire first-quarter results. Frankly it’s enough to make this former sexpert nostalgic for the glory days of the last recession when any girl worthy of her nipple tassels could please a punter with a saucy magazine.

The Erotic Print Society, or EPS, parent company of the Erotic Review, which I edited for almost eight years, was born out of the last recession. The Society’s founding fathers, James Maclean and Tim Hobart (once described to me as ‘the two fat ladies of porn’, not because they were rotund, but because they were posh, fruity and wayward) were art dealers whose trade dropped off drastically in the early 1990s. They therefore decided to expand a lucrative sideline they had developed dealing in period erotic artworks. If they reproduced the original material as limited-edition prints and books they could, with luck, bring upmarket concupiscence to the masses.

And so it proved. The provocative but tasteful EPS advertisements were scattered across the British press. As one might expect, readers of right-leaning broadsheets proved more enthusiastic and open-minded about erotica than Guardianistas. We sold more butts to Guildford than we did to Manchester. Eric Gill’s ravishing woodcut of a naked Eve’s derrière was one eye-catching image, although the Daily Mail deemed the ad too rude for its readers despite the fact the original artwork was on show in the Tate. Another advertisement caused complaints after it was run alongside the Telegraph crossword; nevertheless, several hundred people sent off for the wares. Soon 50,000 aficionados had bought the Erotic Print Society’s ribald catalogue at a fiver a pop. This was the start of a rapidly expanding database of customers to whom the Society could market its portfolios and books.

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