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I just want to echo Steve's remarks. I bought several years worth of the letters from CFPub's early this year and I too found them something of a disappointment. Many were very provocative and interesting in a historical sort of way but were not the life changing revelations that I remember from those years. They are still fun though. But then the advertisements were just as interesting. As were the grainy B&W girlie photos. But I suspect Steve is right in that many years of reading good spanking fiction and real-life CP experience has dulled their appeal.

Regardless, they were what brought many of us into the genre and I'm still grateful for that. I might have gotten here anyway but it surely would have been a different experience without those letters that I originally read practically under the sheet with a flashlight.

I find myself somewhat envious of those coming up behind me that live in a society that is much more accepting of peoples individual sexuality or at least willing to consider something outside the norm. (What ever that really is). Or probably more likely; we are simply more honest with ourselves in this era.

I too am grateful to MR for letting me into a world I had no idea even existed. Agreed the letters could sometimesbe of poor quality but there were some real gems as well.
Also there was a paperback book of letters to MR that they had received but not published in the mag. I once owned a copy- and was delighted to find it offered by CF Publications for purchase some years ago.
Besides the letters MR would occasional have fiction with spanking. And the models they interviewed(and accompanied the text with very often great photos of their bare bottoms) would sometimes talk about spanking, about their own experiences or spankings they knew of, or just their general thoughts on the subject.
They also had an Onion-like column called Wild Wide World where sometimes they'd have a "newstory" about a supposedly real spanking that took place somewhere(kind of like BaredAffair). Recall they had a story from Holland about some girls at an all-girls high school who had a sit-in protest and got spanked by parents and teachers, and one about a female judge in Germany fed up with a rash of shoplifting by teenage girls gave the choice of the parents paying a huge fine or giving their daughters a paddling. And it said only on mother opted to pay the fine!
Wouldnt it be great if someone had an MR collection and would post those stories here or somewhere online!

Interesting fact about those model "interviews". For years readers were confronted with the interesting but improbable fact that every one of Mr's centerfold models had been spanked while growing up and was willing to discuss it. Suddenly, although the models continued to expose themselves to the current legal limit on skin, the subject of spanking disappeared entirely from the interviews. The way I heard it from a semi-reliable source is that one of the models upon reading her "interview" was shocked/embarrassed by what Mr claimed she had said and sued. I don't know how the suit turned out, but Mr apparently chose discretion from then on and the models' mythical spankings vanished from their pages.

Redskinluver,

I do have a collection of Mr. magazines from the 60's and early 70's but whether posting them is possible is an interesting question since I am not familar with the relevant copyright laws. Also the news story section, called Wild Wild World, usually had photos along with the story and I don't think that the Spanking Library accepts photos or non-fiction pieces.

Perhaps the Library administrators could answer those questions.

To answer the questions raised by the above:

I don't actually know anything about the magazine which is being discussed but I assume the content is copyrighted and so we couldn't load content from them without the permission of the author(s).

All our content is purely plain text, we don't load images.

Despite being called the Library of Spanking Fiction we do load the occasional 'article' which would be considered non-fiction but have a policy of not loading anything which claims to be a real life account of actual events. (As far as letters in spanko mags are concerned we would typically assume them all to be works of fiction).

MR has been long gone,maybe since the 70s and the content could be public domain. After all CF did publish them.
The Wild Wild World "articles" I remember about spanking didnt have photos of the event so thats hardly an issue. As for their genuineness-could they not be as much fiction as the letters? But how do we know all the letters were fiction? Could someone not have sent them an actual account and they published it?
Didnt know about the issue with models, do know that in later years the spanking content diminished considerably and became much less interesting in the mag as a whole.

Although not a lawyer, I am reasonably certain that the question of whether the letters are fact or fiction is irrelevant to the copyright question.

As to how CF dealt with the copyright question in publishing the Mr Letters, I simply made my own decision that nobody's interests were being hurt in publishing letters from a defunct magazine owned by a defunct publisher and the interests of a number of spankos were being promoted. One can reach other conclusions without being intellectually incoherent, but neither do I think my decision was wrong.

I think Steve is probaly right on the copyright question. Technically, yeah, everything published since at least 1923 is potentially still covered. But who and where is the owner? Good question. My guess is that ownership is in some defunct corporation. Therefore the risk is small. If published before 1979 was the copyright registered? another good question. I'm guessing no.

The MR letters, model interviews and wide World I remember all too well. When I wrote the "Letters to Annie" that are now in this library I had in mind the old MR and Pats and Peeves letters. All that was undoubtedly fiction. I think an interesting question is, who was behind MR magazine? Is he still around? Why all the spanking stuff? No other "mens" magazine seemed so fixated on this.

I recently re-read some old Will Henry and Paul Little books and I had to laugh that I once found that stuff such a turn on. Now it seems so quaint and old fashioned. Really there are much better writers on this board today.

Not that I'm suggesting we apply it in the case being discussed but my understanding of copyright for the US is that copyright doesn't need to be registered and that it's 70 years after the death of the author. I believe, however, copyright would need to be registered if the author, or representatives thereof, wished to bring a lawsuit for infringement.