Book Review: The Big Bad Book of Spanking Positions by Peter Birch
The Big Bad Book of Spanking Positions is available now.
First up I will just say that I’m a long-term fan of Peter Birch and that his books almost certainly had a terribly corrupting influence upon me as a young lad… What I’m saying is: blame him for everything!
Well, where to begin. To start with let’s go for the book’s weaker aspects. The plot is minimal, in fact one might be tempted to think that this isn’t really a piece of erotica at all. There are words, certainly, but these are minimal, they seem to correspond to the images on the pages, but there’s no clear sense of narrative.
On the plus side, the pictures themselves are rather lovely. In fact, whilst we’re on the subject I want to bring up something I don’t usually talk about, the sheer physicality and production values of the book itself. It’s a hefty A4 size, and manages to be the only book on my shelf bigger than Midori’s ‘The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage‘, which is impressive. This is a book that’s just daring you to use the adjective “coffee table”. Internally it’s mostly pictures or rather ‘plates’. You see all the images are presented as fuzzy edged ovals that evoke the feel of a Penguin children’s picture book. That said most of the images in this book are most definitely not suitable for children and overall there’s an enthralling mixture of the innocent and straightforward with the most definitely adult and playful.
On the downside I’ll first up say that it is a little short. This is a particular drawback when set against the book’s hefty price tag. There’s also a notable absence of variety in terms of sex and body type of the models. And as we’re talking about the production values it’s also let down a little by paper that just feels a bit too fragile for a coffee table book. These gripes aside, this is a rather esoteric book and I think it’s a case of if you ‘get’ it then it will doubtless have a well-earned place on your bookshelf. One for the discerning spanko… and Christmas is just around the corner.
Thank you very much for your kind remarks! I can only agree about the paper quality, which is an issue we’ll address if we do a new edition. That does make the book seem a little thin, but I’d like to think that fifty plates showing over seventy pictures is fair. I also take your point on the variety of body image, which is down to that most mundane of considerations: cost. In an ideal world I’d have used half-a-dozen or so models in an equal number of settings appropriate to different groups of positions, but as the book was financed entirely out of my own pocket that wasn’t practical. Who knows, maybe next time?