I was at the university library earlier today and browsed through some old Finnish pulps and a volume of the skin mag, Cocktail, from 1974. I mentioned this earlier, but didn't elaborate. I've been corresponding with a veteran pulpster* who contributed also to Cocktail. I was checking upon his stories and have already made a deal that I can reprint one of his old skin stories (more about this project later on). He wasn't particularly proud of having written this kind of stuff and I promised not to give away his name.
This here thing is a photo from Cocktail. Strange one, indeed: they look like they're in some Just Married photo, and yet they are naked! The old black & white porn is something weird. I don't know why really, but although it's sure far more realisting than today's PhotoShop sex fantasies it strikes me as ugly and grotesque. The fun part of reading old pornography in the university library wore out pretty soon!
One strange thing more: I found a story by a guy called Alf Bester. Now, is this the Alf Bester, the writer of Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man? Can it be? Sure it can, but I haven't seen any evidence of him having written pornography. The story in Cocktail was set in Mallorca, though, and Bester did earn his living writing travel articles...
* Well, not really a pulpster, since he started in the late sixties. He wrote nearly everything for the slicks and men's mags and also some pretty obscure ones, such as the marvellously titled Isojen Poikien Kuvaristikot (= The Crossword Puzzles for Adults). He has also written lots of SF for the Finnish fanzines under an alias and received actually quite a lot of fandom prizes.)
2 comments:
I find it amusing that he's more on display than she is, in that photo...I choose to suspect she is Alf Bester, since, as noted previously, Alfred Bester signed his work thus, and went by Alfie as a nickname. Though it remains possible that something he wrote in his last unhappy years was published under a clumsy abbreviation of his name.
Maybe they thought he was the better-looking of the two. There's not much hot sex in the thing, don't you think? This was one of the nicer photos in the mag, usually there was more flesh and other bestial stuff, even to actual blow-jobs &c.
I'd forgotten you'd mentioned Bester never went by "Alf". My actual guess is that it's just somebody thinking "Alf Bester" is a good name. After all, the same mag had Clark Kent writing stories for them.
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