“You could probably make a timeline of how pornography’s changed with how stiff the dick is,” Dave, the owner of North London’s RamBooks says. He would know: the congenial cockney has been in the business of selling it for nearly half a century, starting in the flaccid ‘70s and semi-erect ‘80s through to the Viagra-fuelled present. “But I’m still simple,” he adds. “I like old-fashioned Penthouses, Playboys, that kind of stuff. Half-naked women in lingerie. Instead of, you know, fist-fucking.”
Porn is in the man’s roots. Born in 1959, Dave—mononymous when speaking publicly—grew up on Danbury Street in Islington. One day, when he was seven or eight years old playing with his mates, he noticed some rubbish left outside of an arched warehouse next to a mysterious shop with blacked-out windows across the street from his house. He’d always been curious about it. Upon investigating the contents of the rubbish, he and his friends excitedly discovered a plethora of dirty magazines.
At age 18, Dave was in a punk band and creating too much clangour at home for his mother to bear. “She threw me out of the household as fast as she could because she got fed up with my guitar playing,” Dave says. “‘Get out and go work for your uncle!’” That uncle happened to own Supermags in Soho—London’s red light district at the time—a smut emporium on the corner of Dean Street and Old Compton Street which had re-opened after closure precipitated by the Dirty Squad corruption scandal.
The Met’s Obscene Publications Squad, it was discovered, was a “firm in a firm” of bent coppers running a protection racket, extorting Soho’s sex industry for millions of pounds in solicited bribes. A Serpico-esque anti-corruption unit investigation resulted in the prosecution of 18 police officers. “A lot of Soho closed down for a while, and reopened just as the detectives were getting their sentencing,” Dave says.
By the time Dave started working at Supermags—and his uncle’s other porn shop, Court Bookstore—replacement officers tasked with enforcement of the Obscene Publications Act were rotated in-and-out every six months. “They didn’t want the PCs [Police Constables] getting friendly with the people in the shops, because they were completely scared of the same thing happening again,” Dave says. At one stage, there were approximately 65 porn-related stores in the area’s roughly one square mile.
His uncle’s Soho shopkeeping career began in the early-‘60s. Prior to that, he’d run a stall at Birmingham’s Bull Ring open market, selling tea towels and eventually tulips from Holland. “I think that’s where he got his porn connections,” Dave says. When Kenny Lynch Record Centre in Walkers Court—owned by his friend, the famed singer—wasn’t doing too well, Dave’s uncle took it over and pivoted, ditching the vinyl and offering more prurient (not to mention lucrative) product with the opening of Court Bookstore. Supermags, too, was a record shop before his takeover.
One of Dave’s first trips to buy stock with his uncle took him to his childhood neighbourhood in Islington. “He drove me straight to where I used to live, and went to that arch opposite my old house,” says Dave. It turns out the warehouse outside of which young Dave and friends came across the XXX refuse was a major wholesaler. The unmarked shop with the black curtains next-door? A porno cinema. Mystery solved, it was clearly meant to be.
As proprietor of a business trading in illicit goods, Dave’s uncle passed on some useful, street-wise maxims. “‘Don’t take your picture in the shop. Don’t get caught in pictures carrying boxes around. Don’t have any tattoos,’” says Dave. “Back then PCs used to ID by distinguishing marks, and it wasn’t against the law to give a different name. So the police would come in, and you could say ‘I’m Joe Bloggs’ today, and ‘Fred Bloggs’ tomorrow, and they couldn’t do anything. But if you had a distinguishing mark….” To this day, Dave avoids being photographed and remains safely tattoo-less, despite the temptation to partake in body-mods as a young punk. “I never even had red hair!”
When entering a shop like Supermags back in the day, at the front you’d be greeted only by innocent, soft glamour mags. Towards the entrance, an employee—called “the chair”—would sit and suss customers out. If they were clearly not a policeman, and sported a nice enough suit and shoes to seem like they weren’t time-wasters, they’d get the invite to peruse the hidden hardcore. “‘Do you wanna go in the backroom? There’s some better stuff in the backroom…,” Dave says, emulating the old lingo. “Then they’d never let them out until they bought something!”
The Obscene Publications Act of 1857 (amended in 1959 and 1964) does not dictate explicitly what materials law enforcement must prohibit from the public. Rather, it gives broad discretionary power to individual officers in vice units to determine subjectively what constitutes obscenity. This absurd piece of legislation is still on the books.
“Everybody was against the sex shops—the council, police, London weekend television—always against Soho,” Dave says. “As the years have gone on, the same people are now moaning about the death of Soho. They don’t want Soho to end up like Covent Garden, but I think it’s too late.”
Dave recalls police raids at Supermags, Court, and 45—his uncle’s third shop, also on Old Compton—happening every 2 to 3 weeks in the beginning. Merchandise was constantly being confiscated, and though the stock was relatively cheap, lawyers were expensive—barristers even more so. “We used to weigh up how much stock was taken against what it would cost if we wanted to fight it,” Dave says. “So most raids were never contested.” Ironically, the raids backfired in only serving to increase demand with publishers, as shops had to quickly and routinely replace stock.
Eventually, the PCs and porno peddlers got to know one another well enough. “It was a kind of, ‘Well, you’re doing your job, I’m doing mine.’ More often than not we’d buy them a cup of tea,” Dave says. “We’d even help them out with the bags! The quicker we got them out, the quicker we’d get the replacement stock back in.” As raids eased—“They were running out of space!” Dave says—police became more selective about what they’d seize. “They’d leave the Bounce or Busty mags, leave the gay mags, and just take the bondage.”
While bondage and female domination are indeed big-selling genres, spanking is the true evergreen fetish in the UK. What’s to account for this perennial local preference? “Everybody used to get the cane when you were at school,” Dave says. Enormously successful spanking-specific publications like Janus—which hilariously features the same Ancient Roman coin logo as the esteemed arthouse film distributorship of the same name—at one point were printing 45,000 copies of each issue published to satisfy demand.
“I had a row with my uncle one summer, and he sacked me,” Dave says. He rebounded with a gig at RamBooks on Moore Street. By the end of the summer, Dave’s uncle was conciliatory: “He said, ’Come back! No one’s doing the stock-buying!’ So I left Ram, and came back.” When RamBooks’ owner Mickey Harris later died, the shop closed, and Harris’ brother Tommy took the shopfront sign, all the stock, and the rights to some spanking films.
Dave eventually became a business owner himself in the ‘80s, coming full circle in returning to Islington. He ran Zeitgeist on Holloway Road for some three decades as a rubber clothing and sex shop. In 1989, Dave even took a stab at publishing with Zeitgeist magazine, originally conceived as a de facto porno-catalogue to showcase the rubber items he had for sale. Ever the autodidact, Dave did all the design and layouts himself over seven issues.
“By the time he reached the attic, true seedy treasure was found”
After over 50 years of living in the city, Dave and his wife moved to Brighton in 2010. By then, he’d amassed an unwieldy collection of old unsold stock from over the years in storage—an accumulation that had really picked up in the ‘80s as home video changed the market. “When VHS came in, no one wanted magazines,” Dave says. It got to be too much for his wife, who suggested he clear out his warehouse by re-opening the empty Zeitgeist space on Holloway as a boutique for collectors.
Dave’s uncle was still trading at the time, so instead of using Supermags’ branding, he met with Tommy Harris about acquiring Ram’s legacy assets, and in 2012 RamBooks was revitalised. Initially operating just a website selling only old spanking stock, Dave and a friend painted and fixed the shop up to sell a rotating selection from his now-rare archive of historical mags and other vintage erotic ephemera. “It became popular. But being a collector myself, I’m standing there when people are buying stuff thinking, ‘I’m probably never gonna see that again,’” says Dave. These days, Dave makes sure to have any rare magazines scanned cover-to-cover before parting with them. This hi-res digital archive is 3,500 scans deep so far. He’s in the process of deciding on how to make available to the public.
One day, Dave got a cold call out of the blue from a solicitor’s agent about a house in Wandsworth, the deceased owner of which was a prodigious collector of porn. He said they’d already thrown away five skip-loads, but the recycling facility was refusing to take anymore, and some 30,000 magazines remained. Dave headed south of the Thames to investigate.
The deceased had come from quite a wealthy family, owning a couple of diamond mines in South Africa. There was a sign above the garage written in French, which translated to ‘The Pleasure Garden.’ “Luckily enough they’d started emptying the bottom of the house first.” The magazines downstairs from which the skips were indiscriminately loaded were of more recent vintage—Dave surmised he’d stopped buying in the late-‘80s. As Dave ventured upstairs, however, the collection got much older and more rare. By the time he reached the attic, true seedy treasure was found with a trove of handmade Soho Typescripts—a.k.a. Soho Bibles—from the ‘50s and ‘60s. The most valuable of postwar pornography, Soho Typescripts were typically sold under the counter, and consisted of short stories or novellas with scatterings of drawings or photographs. Today, they’re difficult to find.
At first Dave thought to make business cards to send to every solicitor he could in the hopes of repeating the Wandsworth goldmine. But then as he was watching TV, an advert for WeBuyAnyCar.com came on the screen. Suddenly inspired with a capital idea for acquiring more dead men’s porn, Dave rushed over to his computer. WeBuyAnyPorn.com, .co.uk, .net—every iteration was available. “I bought them all that night,” he says.
Dave put a sign for the URL outside his shop, built the website in two days, and started getting inundated with calls overnight which haven’t stopped since. Of those reaching out for Dave’s services, he says 10-15% are people who’ve found an unwanted stash in their new house they’ve just moved into, and 30-35% are relatives of the porn-collecting recently deceased. The rest are still-alive lifelong collectors who have gotten to a certain age and decided it’s time to, with a heavy heart, move on.
There was the World War II Spitfire pilot letting go of his Harrison Marks collection, and the nurse in Portishead who rang Dave when clearing out her uncle’s place (“She said, ‘David! I’m a nurse—I see dicks all day, every day, but this is too much dick for one person!’”). One particularly eccentric pick-up involved a collection where the magazines were kept in individual brown paper bags, each with a personalised synopsis added via typewriter. Examples include “LENA AND BIG TITTED GIRL BEING ARSE FUCKED. and Tennis [sic] changing room arse fuck”.
Dave was even once contacted by a vicar in Hastings, when one of the church’s cottage tenants passed away leaving behind some Penthouses in the wardrobe. “Very industrious for a vicar to come across my number,” says Dave. He gave £400 for the lot as a ‘donation’ to the church to go towards the funeral.
Over the years, “our clientele has changed,” Dave says. “We’ve gotten more and more young people, and more and more women.” He thinks it’s a symptom of “women… taking back their sexuality”. It’s true—I spent over three hours at Ram on a recent Friday for this interview, and 90% of the customers who came in were hip young women. They seem like the types that have a MUBI subscription, shop Margaret Howell sample sales, and know their way around the wine list at 40 Maltby Street. They also, on occasion, come to Ram to see how much a few original issues of Buttman missing from their collection might set them back. (Dave generously let them go for a tenner each.)
The few men who came in more or less looked like what you’d expect – a couple of metal-heads who could’ve been River’s Edge extras, and an older bespectacled guy teeming with the sweaty energy of a Todd Solondz character. He was combing through the honour system charity section near the entrance – a stack of old magazines in condition not quite shelf-worthy, which Dave offers for free so long as some money is left in boxes for worthy causes such as Help for Heroes, Friend Farm Animal Sanctuary, and Marie Carie Cancer Care. (In the past couple of years, this has raised £3,500.)
To boot all of his employees are creative, punky young women—“the girls” per Dave—a cool bunch who use Ram as a rich resource of inspiration for their own projects. “They drove me mad for a job—every single one of them. They’d work for free if I let them.” One of the girls I met—formerly a Vivienne Westwood stylist—has been working at the shop for two years, and is gearing up to launch her own perfume brand.
RamBooks is open on just Tuesdays and Fridays, from 12:30-6:30pm, though they’re currently trialing Saturday service. “Part magazine shop, part erotica museum,” as Dave calls it, it’s an oddly essential, one-of-one nostalgic sanctuary. Dave points out that even the smell of old naughty mags can elicit something like a Proustian reverie for those who grew up with them. For some, a thick old copy of Playboy might just be their salacious version of a tea-dipped madeleine.
Credits
Written by: Spike Carter
Photography: Jackson Bowley