Any other guys enjoy reminiscing about the old top shelf days?!

[scamp_ster]

Anyone one else feel a strange fondness thinking back to those days?

Getting off on soft core stuff like Men only, Fiesta and razzle! The nightmare of trying to get in and out of your chosen newsagents (usually miles away from where you lived) without being spotted!

And the ridiculous lengths you'd go to score hardcore, not to mention the prices you paid! But all worth it when you finally got your sweaty paws on a well thumbed copy of private, colour climax or rodox! Instant hardon!

Don't get me wrong, the internet is great, instant access to whatever niche smut gets you off, just sometimes it's to fun reminisce with guys from a similar era.

[thunderfly]

In the top shelf days you had to either make do with porn that was soft or be conned into paying for what pretended to be hard but wasn't (black circles over the good bits or covers that were hard but contents that weren't once you'd removed the shrink wrap).
The 'Mary Millington' type of magazines weren't bad from about 1976 to about 1979. They weren't hard but were 'strong' in their own right and had a certain erotic 'feel' to them that was definitely stronger than the usual Penthouse and Mayfair type of mags which I never even bothered with TBH. As for getting hold of the 'real thing'. I never found this easy or had much success in this field until it bacame legal at the end of the 1990s and I had the internet.
I had an Asian newsagents just around the corner from me who stocked quite a good selection of the stronger mags and I never felt embarrassed buying from them. If there were any other customers in the shop, I just used to loiter until they'd gone before making my purchase.

[scamp_ster]

Fairplay thunderfly! Can't say I had the same confidence as you, took me ages to pluck up the courage to actually buy a mag and even then it was a case of grabbing the first thing that looked promising and paying for it as quickly as possible and getting out!

I guess I was lucky in that being a Londoner there were a good few dirty bookshops up west, in Soho, Tottenham Court Road etc and you cld strike gold and get some decent hardcore. I actually felt happier going in those places than my local newsagent. More anonymous and actually quite cool hanging with all the other pervs!

[Schwenck]

Yes, hours spent loitering while waiting for someone else to leave the shop!
I am fairly small, so in some shops top shelf was too high for me to reach.
But I remember back in the 60's there wasn't really a top shelf in some places, they were just put on display in a group, somewhere on the shelf display, but not the top one. At John Menzies, at the West End of Princes St., there weren't even any shelves. Magazines of all types, including 'Gentleman's' were all piled up on a vast counter.
The other thing was having a bag or a newspaper (preferably Broadsheet - I was a Times reader) to hide the mag on the way out of the shop.

I am sure that more assured and confident men just marched in, purchased and marched out, but I could never manage it, especially as a teenager. One thing about browsing in a proper porn shop was that you knew everyone was there for the same thing - much less stressful. When I was older, I used to enjoy browsing in second-hand magazine stores for the same reason.

[black7]

The phrase "never judge a book by its cover" never rung more true when I used to by a top shelfer. I always picked the mag with the girl in lingerie on the cover only to be dissapointed when I got home and found the cover shot was the best picture!

[Greenman]

If you went to your local newsagents you had a problem if they knew you in there because you would be too embarrassed to go up to the shelves, pick the magazine up(and also a comic or newspaper) and then pay for it. I used to go to other places and I must confess I did nick a few magazines when they weren't looking-I basically found a blind spot on their big mirror and I got quite adept. Mind you, I didn't have a lot of money as a teenager although I did pay for them eventually. One fell out of my pocket once and I ended up having to pay for it. It seems hard to believe that top-shelf mags don't exist anymore, at least the ones we remember and you don't even have them in railway stations or other public places where you used to be able to go into a WHSmith and pick up the latest M*yF*ir or P*Hhouse(the classier mags)


On the subject above about being fooled by the cover, yes that had happened many times to me, thinking a particular Page 3 girl might be in there only to discover this was a ruse OR she would be but NEXT month!