Spanking “Tart Cards” Revisited
A very long time ago, I posted about a fellow named Mike who had compiled a small gallery of advertising cards for BDSM escorts in London. At the time, I only posted one of Mike’s delightful cards.
Well, since 2004 this entire genre of risque advertising art has nearly been forgotten. The cards themselves were utterly disposable. They were published cheaply, usually with art borrowed from porn magazines, and were designed to be left or pasted up in phone booths and similar public places. Few people thought they were worth saving! So, now that Mike’s site has been off the web for a long time, I think it’s both fair and desirable to post some more from his collection.
I hope you think these are worth saving!
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These are excellent! Younger readers may not know that before the internet, BDSM pros used to advertise by leaving cards like these in London call boxes (“phone booths” as we used to say in America). “What’s a phone booth?” I hear these youngsters asking now (sigh).
When I saw card #2, SB, a light bulb flashed inside my head – something to do with Paula Meadows, surely? I seem to recall a photo of her in that position but it may have been one of her drawings, many of which had spankees who bore a suspicious resemblance to Paula herself. Then when I saw card #4 that confirmed it was Paula, for I posted a version of this drawing of hers as colored by Doctor Cylon only a month ago (here it is for the curious).
It appears that these girls – if it wasn’t the same one using different aliases – took some of Paula’s drawings from Janus or Februs, photocopied them, added a little color and then printed them up for their business cards! Enterprising young ladies to be sure.
This was the era when, if you had a decent computer and scanner and printer (about $6,000 all together, but these setups were available by the hour in your better photocopy shops) you could scan, manipulate, crop, and print on card stock just about anything you could fit under the scanner, but most people didn’t know it. I made some money selling homemade postcards on eBay in that era. So, yeah, I recognized some Paula artwork, and my expectation is every other graphic on these cards was also scanned/borrowed/stolen from porn magazines of the era.