The Maya: Palaces and Pyramids of the Rain Forest

Henri Stierlin

“Stierlin bases his presentation of these remarkable examples of Maya architecture on the latest findings from excavations. Cities have been rediscovered in the depths of the rain forests, along with soaring pyramids, mysterious tombs, palaces with frescoes and stelæ… Only very recently has it been possible to decipher Maya hieroglyphics to any great extent. This new research is used to full advantage by this volume as a key to unlock the mystery of Maya architecture. Includes more than 250 color illustrations, computer-aided reconstructions, plans of famous buildings and clear chronological tables that place architectural developments within the context of historical events.”

Publisher: Taschen
Hardback: 240 pages
Illustrated

The Art of Eric Stanton: For the Man Who Knows His Place

Edited by Eric Kroll

Warning: This book is big. Really big. Big enough for a small-waisted, big-busted, long-legged, overheated bitch in a fur-trimmed black negligee and stiletto heels to use as a weapon; that is, if a scrub brush, vacuum cleaner hose, riding crop, belt, rug beater, gun, two-by-four, whip or golf club isn't handy. (Or if another prevalent form of punishment in Eric Stanton's world—suffocation by crotch—is deemed too good for the miserable cur.) “A woman has to be strong,” says Stanton, “The bigger the better.”
Stanton got his start in the early ’50s when Irving Klaw published his first comic book. These early works had women serving equal time as bondage subjects (“Girls' Figure Training Academy”) and Amazons (“Dawn's Fighting Adventures”). He went on to share a studio with Spiderman's Steve Ditko, and to produce compelling covers for erotic magazines and novels in his masterful pulp style. He continues to run a thriving mail-order business, which consists of picture stories he customises to the client's request. (One such collaboration is reproduced in its multiple stages in this book.) Stanton's lengthy career is a tribute to his and his viewership's polymorphous perversity: Just leafing through this book—even with both hands—can leave the impressionable reader in a state of near-exhaustion. MH

Publisher: Taschen
Hardback: 400 pages
Illustrated

Bizarre: The Complete Reprint of John Willie’s Bizarre, Volumes 1-13

Edited by Eric Kroll

Any lingering doubts about the protean authenticity of fetish artist John Willie’s genius are crushed under the weight of Taschen’s page-for-page reprint of all issues of Willie’s magazine, Bizarre, edited and introduced by contemporary fetish photographer Eric Kroll. Published intermittently from 1948 to 1954, Bizarre was a kind of Baedeker to the demimonde of fetishism, sadomasochism, transvestism and other now fashionable paraphilias in an era when married couples couldn’t be shown sleeping in the same bed on a movie screen. More importantly, it was a showcase for his original illustrations of fetishistically costumed women in bondage, which remain the biblical authority for fetish-derived art and fashion today.
Willie (real name: John Alexander Scott Coutts) was the sort of raffish figure the U.K.’s better classes have exported for years, a flamboyantly eccentric remittance man, paid by his stolid British merchant banking family to stay away from home. Shipped off first to Australia, where he began his tempestuous relationship with his volatile muse, Holly, he worked in intelligence during WWII before moving to New York to pursue his “hobby” full time. That hobby, which is often generically described as bondage, encompassed a wide variety of interests—reflected in the pages of Bizarre—ranging from corsetry to amputee fetishism. He carried on a voluminous correspondence with fellow enthusiasts around the world, publishing their invariably literate and often touching accounts of their secret passions under pseudonyms like “Hobbledehoy” and “High French Heels.” Excavation even turns up a letter from the young Fakir Musafar, the most visible contemporary interlocutor of the body-modification culture. Thus, among his other accomplishments, Willie became the first historian of what has since become a vast and much-inspected sexual bohemia.
But it is as an arbiter of erotic taste that Willie enjoys immortality. His elegant renderings of idealized women in dominant and submissive poses created an idealized form evident today in everything from John-Paul Gaultier’s dresses to the surgically sculpted bodies of modern porn stars. Though these images are executed with a light hand and an evident affection for their subjects, they possess an undeniable bite that comes directly from the unconscious. Willie’s pinups with missing limbs seem no less radical at a distance of four decades.
Indeed, careful though he was to avoid the strangling obscenity laws of his own time, he was bedeviled by postal authorities and lived with constant economic and legal insecurity, undoubtedly contributing to his propensity for strong drink and his early death. The end of his final affair with 19-year-old Los Angeles model Judy Ann Dull, who died at the hands of bondage murderer Harvey Glatman, may have contributed as well. The artist whose subject matter is sex lives in a perilous world, in every sense, and that very tang of risk, what the late Dr. Robert Stoller called “the element of harm,” is what gives Willie’s work its steely edge beneath all the lace. If there is an indispensable omnibus work of fetish art, this must be it. IL

Publisher: Taschen
Hardback in slipcase: 1 pages
Illustrated

Doris Kloster

Doris Kloster

Fashion photographer Kloster’s portfolio of mostly dominant women, with lots of accessories (starting from the top and working down): gas masks, uniforms, rubber, leather corsets, hip boots, stiletto heels, strap-ons. Mostly submissive men being tortured with (starting from the top and working down): suspension, hoods, restraint, whips, pinching. Sections on shoe licking and infantilism. Kloster’s photos have a self-consciously staged look, rather than the heady playfulness of the Klaw/Page pictures, the bewildering eccentricity of Elmer Batters or Eric Kroll, or the scary autism of ritualist amateur photos. RP

Publisher: Taschen
Hardback: 340 pages
Illustrated

Erotica Universalis

Gilles Néret

Over 700 pages of beautifully reproduced smut. Starting with some sprung Chinese petroglyphs dating back to 5000 B.C. and those racy murals of Pompeii, this sexy art survey cruises on through demonically-driven medieval revelry; to the divinely decadent draftsmen Aubrey Beardsley and Félicien Rops and the horned-out work of such art-museum stalwarts as Picasso and Dali; and winds things up with such obsessive geniuses of bondage art as Tom of Finland, John Willie and Stanton, representing our own fin-de-siécle. SS

Publisher: Taschen
Paperback: 756 pages
Illustrated

Jeux de Dames Cruelles

Serge Nazarieff

Cruel dames, indeed! Jeux de Dames Cruelles is a beautifully produced coffee-table book of over a century of pornographic photos of woman-on-woman sadomasochism. Some of the earliest daguerrotypes in this collection were actually taken back when Venus in Furs was still a glimmer in the mind’s eye of Herr von Sacher-Masoch. Flagellation by switch, cat o’ nine tails and open hand, even biting of plump-bottomed nuns; naughty schoolgirls, persecuted maids in uniform; chained damsels in distress and often multiple butts in various states of disrobement set up in position for chastisement; a photo composite of a reclining woman daydreaming of erotic spanking scenes and even panel-by-panel douche scenes from bygone years are included in this remarkable survey. Many of the shots were taken for photo calling cards for “specialized” Parisian brothels while others were clearly the European predecessors to Irving Klaw’s happy-go-lucky bondage scenarios of the 1950s featuring the inimitable Betty Page. SS

Publisher: Taschen
Paperback: 160 pages
Illustrated

Tom of Finland

Tom of Finland

With the stroke of his naughty pen, the Finnish artist Touko (dubbed “Tom of Finland” by his first American publishers in 1957) pushed the boundaries of male erotic art to comic-book extremes. “Men are men,” says a Tom drawing, “and this is how they fuck.” Contains highlights from Tom’s 50 years of work; from slutty sailors in WWII, to mohawked punks in the ‘80s. The horny heat of cops, truckers, bikers, farmhands and office boys is displayed in all its naked, macho glory. Plus a hardcore Kake adventure. GR

Publisher: Taschen
Paperback: 80 pages
Illustrated

Beefcake: The American Muscle Magazines, 1950-1970

F. Valentine Hooven III

Chronicles the “posing-strap era” of male nude photography and art, in all its campy, beefy glory. All the stars are here: cinema idol Ed Fury; Jim Stryker, the blond god of the beach; Paul Ferguson, who murdered silent star Ramon Navarro with a golden dildo; kitsch fantasy painter Etienne; the young and hung Joe Dallesandro; and plenty of unknown and undressed muscle men, glorifying the American male. In this age of full-color fuck books and porn videos, it’s hard to believe that a photographer could be arrested for publishing or distributing naked male genitalia back in the ‘50s. Many were; that’s the way it was until the fig leaf fell in 1965. GR

Publisher: Taschen
Paperback: 159 pages
Illustrated

The Complete Physique Pictorial

“At the start of the 1950s Physique Pictorial was the first men’s magazine to publish photos of naked men for their own sake. The uncompromising nature of these photographs of flawless bodies, produced solely for the pleasure of the beholder, had not been witnessed since the fall of Rome. In the 1950s this was something new and extremely radical; although neither prick nor pubic hair were on view directly in the early years, the pictures left nothing to the imagination in terms of homoerotic splendor.” The packaging of this three-volume collection (a complete reprint of the magazine’s entire run from 1951 to 1990) surpasses even the supreme level of mouth-watering, glossy perfection that art lovers have come to expect from Taschen. The volumes are bound in bubblegum-pink covers in a matching slipcase that features wraparound images of those fun-loving Tom of Finland hunks er, hanging out. The whole package is so sublime, just looking at it there in its neat, squat box is the equivalent of sticking four juicy pieces of Bubble Yum in your mouth at once. MH

Publisher: Taschen
Hardback in slipcase: 2600 pages
Illustrated

Bettie Page: The Queen of Pin-Up

Edited by Burkhard Riemschneider

Includes a very brief history of Bettie Page, featuring Irving Klaw, the man responsible for the beginning of her bondage and spanking photos, short films and comics. Anyone not familiar with the classic, clean, sweet, good-looking charm of Bettie Page has certainly missed out, but now has a chance to catch up. Full-page photos by Bunny Yeager include whips, suspender belts, lace undies and her trademark extra-high heels. Also includes photos from Robert Harrison’s girlie magazines Beauty Parade, Eyeful, Wink and Titter, covering the market for the bare (or at least scantily clad). Bettie mugged for the camera with consistent integrity throughout her nine-year career.
Lush, curvaceous breasts, black bra, stockings and full panties (some crotchless) are constant; her trademark six-inch heels are included in every shot. From 1948 through 1957, the risqué themes of her work included all-girl wrestling, bondage and insinuated discipline, along with really cool costumes, such as metal bras, early latex and vinyl. Fold-out beds, footstools, coffee tables and many other around-the-house items are some of many props used. Her 1950s naughty-but-oh-so-nice image translates well for the ‘90s, and beyond, because underneath it all, if we’re going to get corrupted, it’s best to be corrupted with style. CF

Publisher: Taschen
Paperback: 80 pages
Illustrated