The Journal of Dora Damage(58)

And on the back, the insignia of Les Sauvages Nobles, with the word Nocturnus underneath, betwixt two ivy leaves.





It was always my endeavour – my very point of ‘modernity’, according to Diprose – to distil the essence of the book in the cover design. Yet nowadays I scarcely had time to read most of the manuscripts before binding them; I would simply scan them briefly, and, for the most part, this was a blessing.

So, when I opened Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, at the point where she describes the impressive member of a young fellow as ‘not the plaything of a boy, not the weapon of a man, but a maypole of so enormous a standard, that had proportions been observ’d, it must have belong’d to a young giant’, I could not help but select a glorious vermilion morocco, and tool down the centre a maypole, prodigious in size but innocent in nature, around which a single voluptuous woman danced, clutching two ribbons in her joyfully outstretched hands.

Ovid’s Ars Amatoria was bound in dark-green hard-grain goatskin with scarlet silk doublures. I blind-tooled the edge with hearts, stars and butterflies, and gold-tooled in the centre a beguiling Venus extracting a myrtle leaf and some berries from the garland binding her hair (as she does at the beginning of Book Three), to give to Ovid along with her pearls of wisdom in the womanly arts. Her instructions were most novel and intriguing to me.





One must lie on one’s back, if one has a beautiful face and attendant features.

But if one’s rear is better, better to be viewed from the rear.

But if it is the breasts and the legs which cause delight, one must lie across the bed beneath the beholder . .





I had never beheld these parts of my body in this way, unfamiliar as they were to me as far-off parts of the globe. For the first time in my life, I started to wonder about my best angle.

Another book, a slim, anonymous volume, which intrigued me, mentioned in passing an extraordinary, magical place, called the Clit-oris. The author was unspecific as to its exact co-ordinates, but it sounded as if it should be in Africa, or Xanadu, or Timbuc-Tu, so elysian were its qualities, especially for the female of the species. As it was an adventure story of sorts, I gave it a spine of grey snakeskin, and on the black silk cover I embroidered an ornate compass, surrounded by waves, islands and fishes in gold, silver and coloured threads, and on the back a naked woman rode a dolphin towards foreign shores.

But, what to do with the new edition of Venus School Mistress, or Birchen Sports, amongst plenty others similarly entitled by a certain Mr R. Birch and others? Before spring 1860, I had lived twenty-five years assuming that the cane was something to be feared, and its use avoided through good behaviour, but I learnt soon enough that there was many a person in this strange world who were zealous disciples of the birch, and indeed, myself became extraordinarily learned in its occult pleasures, in word if not in deed. I could now instruct one on how to keep a supply of birch in water to ensure its freshness and suppleness, and of wooden, metal and leather instruments of torture that surpassed the birch in their ability to scourage, fustigate and, verily, phlebotomise. I discovered that those who lived too deep in the country to frequent the flagellation brothels in the metropolis were blessed with natural wonders that far exceeded the birch: the holly brush, the furze bush, the butcher’s bush and, oh, most joyfully, in summertime, green nettles. I learnt of the eminent noblemen who regularly go for a salutary whipping in order to reap its extensive health benefits (it warms the blood), and how those who called for the banning of birch discipline in educational establishments were depriving an entire generation of the pleasures and passions awaiting them in later life, the taste for which would be developed in youth. ‘What a treat in this seminary for the idolators of the posterior shrine!’ exclaimed one character in one of the dusty manuscripts, and indeed the seminary to which he was referring could have been Damage’s workshop at one point, so replete was it with flagellatory tracts.

And so it was, with such intriguing information at my fingertips, that I reached for Peter’s old birch cane with as much menace as I could feign, and called sternly for my little boy Jack, and when he arrived, sweating, together we spliced it, sanded it and re-varnished it, and then we inlaid it in sections, four reinforced struts running down the front and back covers, and I was to understand it raised more than a chuckle back at Diprose’s establishment.

Harder to develop a design for were the collections of plates with brief introductions but otherwise few words that already had their own visual style, and not always to my aesthetic. For these, I resorted once again to the language of leaves, flowers and herbs; from the ‘secret love’ of acacia to the ‘remembered friends’ of zinnia, I had something, no matter how fragile, behind which to hide. Lilies were safest, due to their ambiguity, but the temptation always to resort to the cautionary oleander, and to eschew the lustful coriander, was great.