Letters

Yes and thanks for the tip Seegee. I just found ref's for the mag on line at Roue.com. Still I would like to know the origin. Neither Wiki or google or OED or the Urban Dictionary has a reference.

I am guessing here but the kinky magazine Janus was first. Janus was the Roman god of doorways and was usually shown as a head with 2 faces pointing in opposite directions, inside and outside. I remember that 2 faced head being shown on the magazine at the time. That always seemed approbriate to me as the people who read that magazine had 2 faces, their vanilla face that they showed the outside world and their inside kinky face.

Later came Februs which probably had the same publisher and just used the next equivalent name in order, January, February, etc. Maybe Februs was born in February; you will have to ask him.

So now we can expect a Marcus?

As far as I'm aware this was the basis for the name .. Janus was an established spanking mag and the publishers wanted to introduce a second mag (which was to be edited and feature line drawings by Paula Meadows whose work I was a big fan of) and made a play on the first 3 letters of Janus as Tiptopper has suggested.

In the very early days of the web it seemed that on most sites someone had already grabbed Janus as their user name so I opted for Februs instead and have been stuck with it ever since.

I always assumed Janus to refer to a woman's two faces, the one that blushes with embarrassment and the one that blushes with spanking - despite the magazine depiction of a bearded gent! It fascinates me that those two faces are often sending such different messages.

I used to love the OBB that Janus had, that was fantasy run wild. Paula Meadows drawings were also exquisite.

I have just sent flopsy a number of OBB letters from Janus from the 70's and 80's that I scanned, so please seegee, feel free to run wild

rollin

Rollin,
I think you are still suffering from the common teenage male illusion "surely girls aren't interested in this too." If you wade thru any random couple of hundred entries in the bibliography of spanking in mainstream literature, you will find that by far the largest single genre is romances. I could go on about how romance publishers shot themselves in the foot in the 80's and 90's when they decided that ideology required that their heroines not be spanked, but you can see Sharon Green (science fiction, but scifi romance) as a sad example.
stegve

Yeah . I do understand the allure in the romance novels where you had some husky hero taming the vixen heroine,but a lot of the romance magazine letters were about mothers and fathers spanking daughters. Why would a teenage girl be drawn to that?

Because they are spankos?