A Middle-Shelf Magazine Reader Writes #13

A Middle-Shelf Magazine Reader Writes:

As an aficionado of "Middle-shelf Magazines", I was excited to read your recent piece on East Dorset Women on Bannisters Magazine - the very organ which first introduced me to the exciting world of realistic "adolescent middle-shelf literature". Given the passage of time, it is almost impossible now to convey the transformation this publication brought about in the lives of curious young men surviving hitherto on the thin diet of transgressive excitement offered by well-"thumbed" second-hand copies of Health and Efficiency Magazines (7d) (with their tattered black and white images of hirsute frauleins limbs aloft playing outdoor table tennis and other de rigour health-inspired sports, as naked as the German authorities intended).

Typical of the "thin gruel" available to inquisitive young

minds before the arrival of the Batcombe Press's

Popular Magazines Series was "Health and Efficiency"

which featured forward thinking European women

in a variety of outdoor environments.

The beauty of the Batcome Press's Popular Magazines Series was that they contained at least 3 colour plates per issue and were printed on heavy duty paper which ensured that pages were much less likely to stick together "au moment crucial". Much as I enjoyed East Dorset Women on Bannisters Magazine, my own journal de choix was East Dorset Women and Water Coolers Magazine; its piquant combination of provocatively posed females and communal office facilities offering a frisson of érotisme impossible à obtenir from its more anodyne stable-mates (East Dorset Women and Carrier Bags etc etc.).

Though it survived for only 2 years and produced only one Annual - perhaps the appetite (let alone the scope) for images provocantes was diminished when office-based impedimenta were involved - East Dorset Women and Water Coolers Magazine remained my "go-to" publication whenever the need for a little something extra struck. Am I alone in finding the conjunction of hot and cold cooler faucets and a well-turned heel irresistible? [Yes you are [Ed]]. If not, I wonder if any other readers would care to share their experiences - on or off piste?

Yours in anticipation

Melvyn Scoops (aged 86)

PS I have swaps.

To Reader everywhere:

PLEASE DON'T [ed]

The Batcome Press's Popular Magazines Series's East Dorset Women and Water Coolers Magazine [RIGHT] enjoyed brief popularity amongst those who tired of the more wholesome al fresco appeal of the older generation of magazines [LEFT].