The discovery of a lifetime

Recently I posted about the absence of literature on spanking when I was a teenager in the late sixties and early seventies. The internet would have been manna from heaven for me, but in those days we were using main frame computers with punched cards and the pc and the WWW were a long way off. However the day did dawn when I was destined to discover Janus.

Oh, happy day. It was 1973 and I was in a street in my college town, when I walked into what looked to be a dusty second-hand bookshop. In fact the shop sold all manner of things. There were new books and old books, 12” records (vinyls) and second hand comics and magazines. I gravitated to the adult magazines and saw the usual girlie titles. I was thinking of buying a second hand one when I noticed a small, book size, publication in a plain cover but with a drawing of a woman draped over a mans knees in the spanking position. I can recall my heart stopping as I reached up and took it off the shelf. Looking over my shoulder to see if anyone was nearby I started to turn the pages. Oh my god! ,  as they say today. There were photos of women being spanked, there were stories and there were letters. I had difficulty taking in the fact that there was a magazine being published which had spanking as its primary subject. I put it back and looked at another issue of Janus. More, there was more spanking and pictures and drawings. With a shaking hand I checked my wallet. The magazine was expensive for a student but affordable if I stayed away from the student bar for a couple of nights (or did not eat); so I selected one copy and headed off to the till at the front of the shop. I hardly dared look up as I presented my purchase but the woman behind the desk was not at all bothered and simply asked for the money. She slid the booklet into a brown paper bag and I was off and away back to my digs. Alas my budget plans came awry when I stopped at the pub on the way back and bought a pint of beer. I chose a dark corner of the pub and opened my package of spanking heaven. This was it – Janus Publications and I would be together for a very long time – almost 30 years. If only Readers Digest had such loyal customers.

The good thing about those small versions of Janus was that you could easily hold it open in one hand and flick the pages with your little finger and grip something else in the other hand. You could also hide it easily in a sock drawer. After a long days work at college there was nothing nicer than to come back to my rooms and lie on the bed doing what young men do a lot of in their youth.  At least I did not go blind and could carry on reading Janus for many years to come.