If you’re currently in your mid-twenties, then congratulations. Not only are you the last generation to experience blackboards at school, phones with buttons and a functioning welfare state, you are also the last to enjoy the thrill of finding porn in the woods.
Luckily, most people our age have never had to try to dispose of a secret porn collection, but it’s easy to imagine how so much X-rated material ended up getting dumped in the wild.
We live in different times now, but there are still porn collections out there and they are still a nightmare to get rid of. But where some see problems, others see opportunity – and that’s where Dave comes in.
Dave has worked in sex shops since the 1970s. Back then, Soho was London’s red-light district and was home to over 50 sex shops. These shops were notorious for being continuously raided by the police, sometimes once a week, under the ambiguous 1959 Obscene Publications Act, a law that’s still in effect today.
“They could walk in and raid me now if they liked,” says Dave, who’s been raided himself countless times and even spent time behind bars for it. “But everything we sold back then is nothing compared to what you can get on the internet now, so why bother?”
Dave’s pornography archive at RAM Books. Photo: Joe Skirkowski
We are standing in RAM Books, Dave’s Holloway Road, shop that is like a museum for all things porn. “We try not to shock people as they walk in,” Dave tells me as I look at the large collection of Playboy’s near the door. The shop is filled with everything you could imagine from vintage mags to Hustlers from the mid 2000s.
RAM is the last of the dinosaurs when it comes to this type of shop, a few still remain in Soho, but most have been lost due to magazines being replaced by films, the internet rendering the need for covert trips to the porn shop obsolete and soaring London rent prices.
“This place started by accident,” Dave tells me. “I had a few other shops that closed down and I needed somewhere to put all the surplus stock so it went in the basement here, then when me and my wife were moving, she said that my collection had to go, so that ended up here as well. It got to the point where I had a shop full of stock, so I just opened it.”
Dave’s ‘collection’ consisted of several garages full of X-rated stock that he had amassed over decades, containing everything from works by legendary adult photographer Harrison Marks to an extensive collection of Soho Typescripts, the clandestinely produced erotic novels from the 40s and 50s that can go for hundreds of pounds. “The trouble was, as soon as it was up for sale people started buying it,” Dave says. “Some of that stuff was really good and I started panicking about running out of stock.”
The newly reopened RAM Books was doing well off the back of Dave’s collection and the surplus stock from his other shops, but as this supply ran dry the problem of how to restock arose. By this point the wholesalers who used to supply the traditional shops had mostly gone bust and all the most popular magazines had been long out of print.
Back in the day, shops used to have people in America who they would pay to smuggle over magazines that could then be copied and distributed over here, but this is impossible without a network of sex shops all working with each other. Dave needed an answer.
Then, one day, Dave got a call from a lawyer who settles estates. “He told me about a house that needed a lot of porn moving fast and asked if I’d buy it, when I got down there the guy showed me a stack of magazines, I gave him £40, then he started showing me more and more stashes around the house until it got to the point where I just offered him £1500 for everything. He put the keys in my hand and told me I had 10 days. I left with about 30,000 magazines, they were everywhere, under the floorboards, in the furniture, even in the loft as insulation.”
This gave Dave an idea, what if he could take people’s unwanted collections off their hands in a discrete way that spares their blushes, while also keeping his shop and collection well stocked.
In 2015, Dave set up webuyanyporn.com. The concept was simple – confidential pick-ups for a fair price and everything that fits the bill (and is legal) gets sold on in RAM Books.
“It blew up overnight,” says Dave, by now we’re standing in a room in the basement which serves as the shop’s erotic fiction section. “What you’ve got to remember is a lot of these people are grieving and you’re taking care of something that can be uncomfortable for them, that’s why even if their collection is no good I’ll still offer to destroy it for them.”
“Doing this has also taught me never to judge. One of the first collections I made was from the type of house you avoid, it looked like it hadn’t been lived in since the 50s. The guy opened the door and he had nails like claws, hair down his back and his dinner down his front, but when he showed me his magazines, they were immaculate, everything was sealed and not a speck of dust anywhere. I got chatting to him and found out about his life and why he lived that way. He was a lovely bloke.”
More of Dave’s collection. Photo: Joe Skirkowski
Meeting Dave makes it easy to appreciate why he’s perfect for this job. It’s easy to feel comfortable in his presence. He has tonnes of stories, can talk about anything, and has clearly lived a life worth living. If I had to sheepishly hand over my dead relative’s porn stash to anyone, it would be Dave.
Recently, WeBuyAnyPorn has taken on a new role – archiving as many mags as possible to create an online reference database that documents an industry that operated in the shadows for years.
To date, Dave has archived every page of over 3000 magazines, even going so far as to edit out blemishes from years of wear and tear. “It’s an art form that no-one has ever kept a record of and it’s being lost, probably never to be seen again.”
“Attitudes to porn have changed a lot, now I have academics from universities and researchers from museums coming here to give talks, even the police have started classing porn as social history and have invited me to see things they seized from shops back in the day.”
Technology and porn have always moved hand in hand. In the 1980s, many adult film producers chose VHS over Betamax. Fast forward a few years and the same thing happens with DVD. Enter the internet and everything changed again. Magazines and DVDs became history almost over night as subscription-based and then free tube sites came to not only dominate the porn market, but at least 30% of all internet content.
It would be easy to imagine that Dave would view the internet as a natural enemy, but that’s far from the truth. “Internet porn opened the industry up to the world, that’s why attitudes have changed,” he says. “It’s put more control in the hands of the creators through things like OnlyFans. It used to be that performers could be taken advantage of, organised crime were involved and there were a lot of people making money off their work. Now they can set their own rates and only do what they want to.”
“It’s empowering for them and this is reflected in my customers. It used to only be men of a certain age coming here, but now we get more women because the mood now is more like: ‘fuck you, why can’t I have this?’”
As I’m about to leave, Dave starts unpacking one of today’s collections. It’s a mix of around 100 magazines. The average haul could be anywhere from 50 to a few thousand. Here, there’s one that really stands out – Cock and Ball Torture in a Nutshell. I wouldn’t want to get caught dumping that in the woods.