Tart cards

A book review from the Saturday Times' Arts section:

Step into any Central London callbox and you can contemplate up to 80 ways of getting tied up, teased, spanked, massaged, fellated or fornicated. Many people think prostitutes’ cards an abomination, but to punters they are a sexual Exchange & Mart, and to the girls they are a commercial necessity. Caroline Archer, though, considers them Britain’s finest free exhibition of vernacular graphics.

Archer, author of the book Tart Cards, is one of a dedicated band of collectors who see the lurid little adverts as a vivid folk-art insight into sexual Britain. Her hoard of more than 1,000 cards stretches back to the early 1980s — a typographical and pictoral miasma of cartoon lusts and slavering porno keywords — rubber, nurse, dominatrix, schoolgirl, cruel, naughty, slut.

Posted by David on September 27, 2003 7:49 PM