Centrefold Venus of the Month 37: Lilith, June 1976

Lilith's centrefold for Club

Some centrefold pictorials resonate with Triple P more than others and here, for June, is one that does so more than most.  In fact, we would say that this pictorial from Club's June 1976 issue is one of our all time favourites.  There is a UK radio programme called Desert Island Discs where people have to select the eight records that they couldn't be without and would take to a desert island.  Lilith would definitely be on our desert island list of centrefolds.

 We like cover girl Dana as well

Club, of course, was the American edition of Britain's Men Only (and, confusingly, not, as some people think, the other Paul Raymond stablemate of the seventies Club International).  Raymond launched Club into the US market in February 1975 and Club International would appear in the US in December of 1976.  Eventually, the two magazines would attain the fourth and fifth biggest selling positions in the American men's magazine rankings (after Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler).

Club used many pictorials that had initially appeared in Men Only in the UK but some months afterwards.  Unlike Penthouse, which during this period tended to have exactly the same pictorials in the UK and US, Club would often pull together, in any given magazine, pictorials from different issues of Men Only.  For example, June's Club carries many, but not all, of the pictorials from Men Only's May edition.

Dana

Given we have a limited number of pictures from this month's centrefold we have decided to include some other pictures from the two issues by way of comparison.  Both Club and Men Only open with cover girl Dana photographed by Clive McLean.  The two pictorials are identical in both magazines.  Dana is, in fact ,Joanie Allum, wife of photographer John Allum and now an excellent glamour photographer in her own right.

Next we have a three girl set by Fred Enke called Love All: Sauna or Later, featuring three girls undressing each other from their tennis clothes and then lounging around in the sauna.  As was often the case, Club reproduced the original and identical Men Only pictorial with rather brighter exposure which made the images somewhat clearer than the more murky UK version.  This was the first lesbian pictorial a sixteen year old Triple P ever saw. We used to get the train to school and it had individual compartments with no linking corridor.  Triple P was in there one morning with several of his classmates when, for some unknown reason, they decided to lift the seat cushions up. Underneath was the May 1976 Men Only.  We  all eagerly scanned the pictures and gave our expert critical opinion.  "She's got no tits" was the immediate verdict on poor Dana and so on.  Lilith was almost universally admired but Triple P was particularly struck by the three girl pictorial.  The others abandoned the magazine when we arrived at our station but Triple P kept it: the first Men Only we ever owned.  It disintegrated long ago but we managed to get one on eBay a year or so ago.  The thing that fascinated Triple P about Enke's pictorial was the black haired girl with the bald pussy; we had never seen a picture of one before!  How times have changed!  

France's Nirvana Nao from the Raymond Revue Bar

After Lilith, the centrefold, Club ran a pictorial featuring photographs by Jay Myrdal featuring the current Raymond Revue Bar theatre show in London.  This also had appeared in the May Men Only but Club changed the somewhat strangely angled pictures in the UK version to a more conventional layout.

Going down in a De Ville

Next Club featured a boy/girl pictorial that hadn't been in the May Men Only but had appeared in the earlier February issue instead. Clive McLean's Delightful, Delicious, Delovely De Ville featured a couple cavorting in a Panther De Ville, a retro-styled car loosely based on the Bugatti Royale but using a Jaguar engine and transmission.  Sixty were built between 1974 and 1985 in Weybridge, a few miles from where Triple P lives.  Both Oliver Reed and Elton John owned one.  

 Esty in Club

Esty in Men Only

June Club's final pictorial, as it was in May's Men Only, featured a young lady they called Esty, photographed by Allan Sass.  Again, the pictorial was identical in both editions but the US one was reproduced much brighter in the US magazine which had the effect of more clearly revealing Esty's pussy.  We are certain that Men Only's darker printing was deliberate in that it kept the girls' pussies slightly less prominent.  Explicit shots of labia had only just started to appear in UK magazines and there was some nervousness about them. Indeed, by late 1977 Paul Raymond's magazines in the UK had become less explicit in this area at the request, they claimed, of their readers. In the US the pussies remained. 

Finally, here is a picture from the May Men Only which didn't appear in the June Club.  Karyl by Clive McLean, featured a young lady and a motorcycle and McLean achieved several effective shots of her popping out of her leathers.

So, having now put her in context, let's return to the lovely Lilith, photographed by Amnon Bar-Tur.  The beguiling thing about Lilith is her wonderfully come to bed eyes.

It's a very simple set-up with Lilith just posing in a bedroom set decorated in the classic seventies Penthouse boudoir look which was becoming so popular at the time with the other magazines.  Her clothes, what there are of them, also reflect the Penthouse romantic, floaty style; adorned with stockings and long necklaces.

This one has some of the wide-eyed appeal of British starlet Madeleine Smith and is rather different from the slutty knowingness of some of her other expressions in this shoot.  To a sixteen year old Triple P the contrast between the beguilingly innocent expression and the brazenly revealed pussy and (wonders!) arsehole (which was just visible even in the murky UK magazine but here is shown in all it's puckered glory) were very potent.

Lilith's prominent bits weren't quite as visible in Men Only as in the Club version of this picture.  We are showing the pictures in the order they appeared in Club which was quite different from Men Only.  The title page was the same but the next three pictures (above) were actually the last three in Men Only's version of the pictorial.

These three didn't appear in the UK's Men Only at all as they would have been considered too explicit even for 1976.  When Triple P bought this copy of Club last year he was delighted to find these extra shots of Lilith displaying separated inner labia,  fingering her clitoris and showing her tasty package from the rear.  It's like discovering extra tracks from a favourite music album!  

This one, which is similar to the centrefold (top) but from a different angle, is another one that didn't appear in Men Only.  The centrefold shot itself was quite the most arousing photograph Triple P had ever seen up to that point.  That huge, fleshy cunt, dominating the area between those soft-looking thighs, the breast caressing and those eyes!  Despite the attractions of the sauna trio in the same issue it was this centrefold that made Triple P determined to keep this magazine.

In Men Only, this picture was the second in the pictorial and even though Lilith's pussy was less visible tthose prominent labia were still visible.  This one probably has the most devastating shot of her eyes.   Her eyes were mentioned in the text accompanying the pictorial in Men Only, which was in the style of an interview with Lilith and even gave her a surname, Leon, which wasn't used in Club.  The UK piece offered her views on bisexuality, masturbation and orgies.  The text in Club was quite different (which it wasn't for the words accompanying the other pictorials in that issue) and was written in the first person, with Lilith saying that she was an expensive hooker who used massage oils on her clients to drive them into a frenzy.  Why the difference we do not know.

Here is another picture of Lilith that didn't appear in the UK.  Club was always a bottom focussed magazine and this one is typical of the then new fashion of displaying their girls' anuses.

Here, however, we don't think that the UK's readers missed out as instead of the one of her with her hand between her legs Men Only offered this sumptuous rear end shot which didn't appear in Club.  We are sure that this magnificent picture had a lot to do with Triple P's fascination with women's rear ends and appreciation of those with  fleshy labia.  If ever a picture in a magazine made a teenage Triple P want to magically be able to dive into a photo it was this one.

The final shot before the centrefold was one which appeared in both issues.  We have never seen any other pictures of Lilith, sadly, but would love to if they are out there!

350 posts, 250 followers, 3.5 million views

Three milestones all in a short space of time so thanks to everyone who reads/and or comments.  It gives us an excuse to put up this picture which we have been sitting on for sometime.  It has no real relevance other than, possibly, some vague symbolism regarding looking to the future, but we just really love this image.

The beautifully constructed young lady is Juliana Goes (and I'm sure she does) a Brazilian model and former journalism student who gained fame in the Brazilian version of Big Brother.  What an utterly toothsome posterior she has!

We are always amused by the number of apartment block-dwelling North Americans who own telescopes so they can look into each other's flats.  It would be a jackpot day if you saw Juliana looking back at you!

Venus in a white vest: Jane Birkin

Triple P's particular friend, S, from Vancouver sent him these fine studies of Jane Birkin in a white vest (or tank as we believe North Americans call the garment - as for them a vest is what we would call a waistcoat).  Miss Birkin, by this time, had shorn her long, sixties locks in favour of this cute gamine look.  You have to be really beautiful to get away with such short hair but, of course, she was.  Apart from these ones with a blue background we have found another two, obviously from a different shoot but the same period.

We were thinking that we would be hard pushed to think of any accompanying text to go with this excellent set of pictures, given that we don't know their origin (if anyone does we would be interested to know), other than to mention the fact that we like girls just dressed in vests (or singlets, as the sporty versions are known in the UK).  Scarlet Knight recently wrote about the journals she keeps and Triple P was reminded that he used to (still does) do something similar.  Not anything as organised or structured as a journal but just accounts of memorable meals, hotels, wines and women.  We suppose this started when we were at college and we used to write to our family, friends and girlfriends.  This continued into law school, with many of our friends having to put up with our stream of consciousness ramblings written on Weybridge station whilst waiting for our connecting train.  Later, we just wrote for our own sake (many of the pieces were too racy to be sent to anyone) as writing has to be practiced and we have always had jobs that involved a fair bit of writing including, over the last dozen years, writing articles for publication. In those days before blogging and, indeed, before personal computers, our scrawled thoughts and recollections just ended up in old file boxes.  File boxes, however, that we have now located in our mother's loft, which we are in the ongoing process of clearing out.   However, on reading about Scarlett's journals we remembered the fact that we first saw our first naked girl in a vest (if that isn't a contradictory term) in real life in the eighties. We also remembered we wrote about it and wondered whether it was in one of the boxes.  Unfortunately, nothing was ordered, pages from different accounts were scattered at random, and it took some time to go through what we estimate was over 1500 sides of notes.  Inevitably, the note we were looking for was near the bottom of the pile but there it was.  Undated, unfortunately but we know that it was December 1987.  Nevertheless, we have a pretty good account of our first girl in a vest although, in truth we remember the incident quite well anyway.  So, with apologies to those who just want to look at the pictures of the lovely Jane, here are some recollections from over twenty years ago...

Triple P's appreciation for girls dressed just in a vests (white ones, ideally, but we also like those grey, sporty ones) began with our then girlfriend S.  S was a work colleague, which is always tricky, and so our relationship had proceeded rather cautiously.  Certainly Triple P was hoping for an escalation from our then "friends outside work" status to something more but S was more tentative.  At this point Triple P was going to the gym a lot and doing a lot of running (we ran our first marathon, in London in 3 hours 45 minutes, the following spring) and S, who had joined the same gym (work offered a big discount) decided that she would like to take up running too.  She invited us to her flat in trendy Richmond (Mick Jagger was one of its notable inhabitants at the time) one Saturday to take her running in Richmond Park.  We hadn't been invited there before, although we often met up at the weekends to visit galleries or go to the cinema.  S liked foreign films, especially if they had lots of sex in them, so we saw a fair amount of arty foreign films at the National Film Theatre and such like.   The previous night we had been to see Jean-Jacques Beineix's Betty Blue (1986) at a cinema in the Haymarket.  Although we knew it had a racy reputation we were, nonetheless, surprised by its opening scene of (very convincing) simulated sex.  We could sense S's excitement but sadly, we didn't have the chance to discuss it afterwards, as we usually did, because we could only get into a late showing and needed to get our respective trains home.  Anyway, after a rather longer than usual kiss on the concourse at Waterloo station we parted for our different platforms, with her reminding me to turn up the following day for our run.

Her flat was on the top floor of an old house.  It was built into the roof so that apart from  a dormer window in her bedroom the other windows were all in the roof giving light but no view.  It gave it a strange feeling: not claustrophobic, as the main room was large, but you felt cut-off from the world.  When it was dark, with the lights off, and all you could see was the night sky it was like being in a Laura Ashley decorated space capsule.  It was all a bit 2001: A Space Odyssey. When we arrived at her flat that winter Saturday morning we were somewhat surprised to see her dressed in tight running shorts and a baggy Miami Dolphins tee shirt (she had lived in Florida).  Now, up until this point we had only seen her in work clothes (which seemed to be identical to her weekend clothes).  Longish full skirts, high collared blouses (more Laura Ashley) and cashmere cardigans.  We were aware that she had an impressive bust but weren't prepared for the exceptionally long legs she was displaying.  Now S wasn't exactly built like a runner (she was built more like a nineteen fifties Playmate) so we weren't expecting much from her running and therefore started her off very slowly.  However,  it soon became apparent that whilst she ran slowly she had excellent stamina and didn't want to stop.  

We suppose we had covered about five or six miles by the time we had returned to her flat.  Now, getting up to Richmond Park from where she lived involved a quite steep hill and by the time we got back home she was complaining that her legs were stiffening up.  She disappeared into the bathroom for a shower and reappeared wearing a white towelling bathrobe. Triple P took a shower too and expected her to be dressed when we emerged, as he had changed back into his normal clothes.  She was still in her bathrobe, however, and suggested that a massage might ease her legs.  Triple P agreed, in the most-off handed way he could manage, but his palms were already tingling with anticipation.  S put some music on her stereo; Rachmaninov's 2nd symphony which she thought was the most romantic symphony ever written (rightly).  She pulled the (Laura Ashley, inevitably) duvet off her bed and then took off her bathrobe.  Underneath she was wearing a white cotton vest.  It was much larger than the one Miss Birkin is wearing in these pictures. It covered her bottom  but, enticingly, had large arm-holes so that delicious slices of the sides of her breasts were revealed as she moved about.  S had the biggest breasts of any girl we had met.  She was a 40DD at this point (although she lost some weight and some bust size as she did more running).  She was.however, very conscious of them so tried to disguise them as much as possible.  She found them quite inconvenient and used to drive her Peugeot GTI with her seat belt draped across her chest but not plugged in properly, much to Triple P's concern, as she found it very uncomfortable. 

She lay on her back on the bed and asked Triple P to get to work.  Triple P knows a come on when he sees one but, nevertheless, she had been so firm in not taking our friendship to the next level that we proceeded with extreme caution as we placed our hands on her leg, just above the knee, and firmly pushed up.  S started  chatting about Betty Blue, the film we had seen the night before but not, as we might have expected from someone who read English at University, about the tragic storyline of un amour fou but rather her recollection of the sex scenes which she seemed to recall in remarkable clarity.   Triple P was simultaneously trying to discuss the film intelligently and working his fingers into her thigh muscles whilst fearing that she would ask him to stop at any second.  It came into Triple P's head that as long as we were talking to her then the massage would continue.  Triple P is quite good at massage as he had had a previous girlfriend , briefly, named T who had been a physiotherapist and she taught him a lot about it.  As our hands slid further up her pale thighs we expected her to push our hand away but, in fact, S responded by slightly parting her legs enabling our hands to massage her inner thighs.  Her upper legs were sparsely covered with very pale golden hairs which caught the light from the winter sunshine flooding through her dormer window.  We knew that she wasn't a natural blonde but as she opened her thighs we were surprised to discover, as her vest rode up slightly that she was a red-head down below.  She was a nice, dark ginger colour; like the ginger marmalade Triple P used to enjoy for breakfast.  Triple P has always had a thing about red-heads (of whatever shade) and we remember wondering at the time why on earth a glorious, natural red-head would dye her hair blonde.  She must have sensed that her bush was exposed but she did nothing to pull down the hem of her vest or otherwise cover herself.  At this point, as our fingers probed her long sartorius muscle (the longest muscle in the human body, of course), our thumb inadvertently brushed against her soft fluff.  

Suddenly, she rolled onto her stomach and Triple P thought that he had gone too far and was about to be kicked out of her bedroom.  But no, she lifted her hips slightly and pulled her vest up to reveal her bottom.  S had a wonderful posterior; fully rounded with that nice sharp curve between gluteus maximus and upper thigh insertion (Triple P studied anatomy as part of his art course at school) with two cute dimples above it.  Now, of course, on what was supposedly a leg massage there is no reason to reveal your bottom but we couldn't resist such a pert invitation and was soon gently kneading her rear,  The more we massaged her the more she spread her thighs until we could not only see her lightly fleeced pussy but we could quite distinctively smell it too.  We gently pushed her cheeks apart to the extent that we could see her rosy anus but still the expected protestations failed to materialise. We remember wondering what to do next and in the end just risked planting a kiss on her pliant bottom.  She didn't seem to mind so we followed up with another and another until she rolled onto her back and offered us her ginger pussy... 

We were, we have to say, somewhat surprised at the sudden passion shown by S, as she had been so diffident about any sort of romantic relationship previously, but it was later explained by her as a combination of having been nervous about moving on after a nasty break-up with her previous boyfriend and her concern about carrying on with someone she sat opposite at work all day.  Oddly, we found out when we admitted it to them some weeks later, our work colleagues had assumed that we had been carrying on for months anyway!  

When we eventually emerged from bed some three hours later we were both ravenously hungry, having run six miles and not had any lunch.  She made me put her bathrobe on (fortunately it was on the large side) and she put back on her white cotton vest.   Triple P had removed this earlier, sliding his hands up her body to push it over her head and revealing her, frankly, rather awe inspiring breasts.

She went to make some sandwiches.  We stood in her tiny kitchen as she bustled about and became fascinated by her vest.    If she bent down or stretched up to reach something from a cupboard there was always an enjoyable flash.  Psychologically, it turned out, she felt comfortable in the vest as it covered up her top half but revealed her legs, of which she was (justifiably) proud.  Apart from their size there was nothing odd about her breasts: they were the same size, they had matching nipples, they didn't droop.  There was, in short, nothing wrong with them in any of the areas that can make some women self-conscious.  They were, in fact, really rather perfect with large rosy areolae and flat, button-like nipples that she liked having licked into perky prominence.  But when she pottered about her flat (or, later on, Triple P's flat), she preferred to keep them covered and she kept them covered in an assortment of vests or singlets.  Triple P, therefore, not only appreciated the peek-a-boo aspects of the garment but it became very closely associated in his mind with sex with S as is Rachmaninov's 2nd Symphony, come to that (as we did). 

When we commented on how much we liked the look she promptly went out and bought some more little vests, including some of the short versions like Miss Birkin is modelling here.  S was quite happy to reveal her ginger pussy and voluptuous bottom to us but liked to keep her bust covered, unless we were actually engaged in what she referred to as "having a pash".

Since the days of S we have enjoyed a number of young ladies who look good in just a vest; S from Vancouver and B from Germany being foremost amongst them.  It takes a certain insouciance to carry off the look well, as Miss Birkin perfectly demonstrates here.  I'm sure there will be more Venuses in vests to come we just need to seek some out...

Non-centrefold Venus of the Month 10: Tricia Wilson, June 1978

With Wimbledon just coming to a close, ten miles up the road from Agent Triple P’s house, we thought it would be a good idea to feature a tennis themed pictorial for June’s non-centrefold of the month.

This time we make a, so far, rare excursion into the pages of Mayfair and their June 1978 issue.  Mayfair tended to feature two types of girls.  Firstly, the home-grown slightly doughy looking efforts from this period.  In a review of Playboy, Penthouse and Mayfair by Michael Wood in the Sunday Times magazine of April 23^rd 1972 he described the Mayfair girls as having a “sad, raddled look, have their breasts awkwardly in string vests, or are doing splits over their beads or boots...the Mayfair girls look as if they know everything, and then some, and are very tired of knowing what they know.” 

Occasionally they bought in a piece by a continental photographer whose girls were better able to match themselves against those in Penthouse, Club International and Men Only.  They were never as explicit in their poses, however; Mayfair girls flashed their fur but kept their bits hidden.

This young lady, for example, doesn't look British at all and we doubt very much that she was actually called Tricia or Wilson.

The pictorial is relatively unusual for a magazine in that it is a chronological striptease.

Christer Flodqvist

These pictures were by photographer Christer Flodqvist who shot a number of glamour pictorials which appeared in the likes of Penthouse and Gallery in the Seventies. 

The appeal of tennis clothes on women are easy to appreciate: very short skirts, socks and predominantly white colours.  Triple P first noticed the effect when, during an unwillingly participated in tennis lesson at a local park he saw his former classmate S in her tennis clothes.

S had been Triple P's junior schools most talented recorder player and even at the age of eleven Triple P realised that she was considerably prettier than normal. Somewhere between leaving junior school and this encounter, when we were both about fifteen, she had turned into 5' 10" of leggy gorgeousness which her very short tennis skirt emphasised perfectly.  

Around this time of year, with Wimbledon in full swing, all the yummy mummies rush around the local shops in their tennis clothes.  Slightly pathetic really but very much appreciated by Triple P as their still-toned thirty-something legs are exposed for our delight.

The photographer doesn't seem to know much about the game or he wouldn't have positioned this resting between games bench in the middle of the court!

Of course the little white socks help the whole image significantly.

This girl, at least, has the tone in her thighs that means that she at least looks like a convincing tennis player.

This final picture Triple P recognises from somewhere other than this pictorial and is the reason that we chose this pictorial for our June non-centrefold.  It's a very appealing photograph to Triple P!

Venuses in Red Chalk by Mihaly von Zichy

Here are some fine nudes by the Hungarian/Russian painter and illustrator Mihaly von Zichy (1827-1906).  Zichy was born in Austro-Hungary and studied in Budapest before moving to St Petersburg in 1847.

He stayed in the city and made a name for himself there as an artist and illustrator.  He was the most fantastic draftsman, as these pictures show.  Many of his works focus on the life of the Russian court.  He moved to Paris in 1874 and lived there for three years before travelling back to Hungary then to Vienna and Venice. Following a trip to the Caucasus he resettled in St Petersburg in 1883.

These days he is most famous for his strikingly animated erotic works, many of  which were issued as sets of lithographs at around the turn of the century.  It is probably fair to say that these are some of the best erotic drawings ever produced and we will look at some of them over on our The Seduction of Venus blog shortly.

Agent Triple P always preferred red chalk or Conte crayon for his own figure work in the past.  The warm red tones, especially on coloured paper, work particularly well for nudes.