#300356 - BZR 11 Bizarre 11 John Willie

BIZARRE, No. 11
Bizarre Publishing Company / John Willie
Montreal, Canada
1952

digital replica

and

optimized

In the beginning (1946), there was John (née John A. Coutts) Willie's Bizarre, "a fashion fantasia," the first digest-sized, fetish periodical. Mr. Coutt’s was the editor, illustrator, photographer and primary writer of the magazine he conceived and brought to life. Around 1957, Mr. Coutt's sold Bizarre Publishing Company to a good friend, who produced issues 21 through 26.

In her Footwear Fantasia column, Sylvia Soulier tells of her car breaking down after a rainstorm. In her kid oxfords with seven-inch heels, she must walk on rain-soaked terrain. The piece includes clear photographs of both footwear and her automobile and a couple of cheerful JW illustrations.

John Willie art illuminates a short bit of prose about figure training. An excerpt from My Country and My People exposes the history, practice and aesthetic consequences of Chinese foot binding.

Other prose features include Fancy Dress for Special Evenings, From Girl to Pony, Miss Bizarre and a Pirate Prison. Picture pages are named On With the Motley! and Frills and Scanties.

Snapshots of girlfriends and wives accompany letters from readers. Correspondence and pictures disclose preferences for high-heeled shoes, boots, corsets, blindfolds, bondage, spanking, jiu-jitsu, chastity girdle, and cross-dressing. Correspondents tout wife-dominant households, in which submissive husbands dress in snug skirts, foundation garments and heels. One wife advises an occasional weekend of discipline to prevent misbehavior from the man of the house. Many praise the magazine.

Throughout the issue, photographs show women in exotic attire. Readers contributed some of these. Others (especially women in bondage) were made by John Willie and a few may have originated in magazines.

digital replica
Every word and picture of the 68-page original is included in the digital replica ebook. Brightness and contrast were adjusted and many specks retouched. Amateurs made the photographs and some have some undesirable textures. Despite shortcomings, all images look better in the ebook than on the old paper.

Some page layouts were revised to present pictures without size reduction on ebook pages.

All new scans.

optimized version
As this is a digest-sized magazine that was produced when publishers were charged by the inch for printed pictures, many of the photographs are small. To show pictures as large as possible on monitor screens, pages are shorter than in the typical optimized ebook, although typical proportions have been retained. The optimized version places each photograph and illustration on a separate page. This sizing forces your computer's video adapter card to fill the monitor screen with page content.

These presentation techniques facilitate careful inspection of fetish details in even the smallest pictures in the magazine. If you had owned the publication for 50 years and looked at it a hundred times, you would not have seen all these ebooks show with clarity and convenience. There has never been a better mechanism for seeing this antique fetish art and photography.

Two e-books, a digital replica and one optimized version, delivered by download link.