We mentioned Vintage Sleaze last time in connection with 1950's "girlie" material, and we have taken this example from them as well. We don't know the original source, but suspect it was one of Robert Harrison's magazines rather than Irving Klaw's photos based on the cut-out shapes and the thickness of the paper. We have here a couple of "catfighting" poses and then the spanking shot, which is the best of the bunch any way you look at it. The spanking pose at least features decent OTK positioning (the spankee is a little too far back and in danger of falling off the spanker's lap) and a nice-looking spanker who seems serious about her work, whereas the "catfighting" ones look awfully silly even if you're into that stuff for some strange reason.
Of course, all this material had to be restrained because of the threat of obscenity prosecutions, and it seems so tame to us it's hard to imagine anyone getting excited by it. We're no experts on 1950's lingerie, but we know there were sexier, more revealing outfits than these during the period. The producers had to be careful not to reveal too much, as you can see. Klaw in particular was justifiably afraid of Postal Inspectors, who could (and finally did) bring charges for sending obscene materials through the mail, a federal offense. It appears that Klaw was indeed convicted and sentenced to two years in federal prison late in his life (1963) but that the conviction was reversed on appeal in 1965 (350 F.2d 155, for any lawyers out there who want to look it up). Even today, obscenity laws exist at the state and federal levels, although prosecutions are rare.
Posted by the Web-Ed on 12/24/2010
01/07/2011 Update - Jim Linderman wrote to us with the interesting tale of how he uncovered this find and what the actual source material was:
"The images, which I believe came from Elmer Batters publications originally...were taken from a HUGE homemade scrapbook, some 70 pages, each with women in lingerie (a handmade fetish book). It was found discarded in a trash bin in the 1960s, by a student in Virginia...and I republished selected pages in my OWN book 50 years later."
That's a great story! If we thought we could find some spanking comics or Humorama cartoons that way, we'd spend our free time dumpster-diving just as that Virginia student apparently did. We can picture the scene now:
