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For Your Convenience
For Your Convenience

For Your Convenience

A Classic 1930's Guide to London Loos

By Paul Pry, Illustrated by philip Gough

FICTION

80 Pages, 4.25 x 7

Formats: Trade Paper

Trade Paper, $13.95 (US $13.95) (CA $18.95)

Publication Date: March 2020

ISBN 9781999313555

Rights: US, CA & CAR

Muswell Press (Mar 2020)

Price: $13.95
 
 

Overview

An entertaining classic 1930s guide to London public restrooms, possibly the first queer city guide, and the first title in the Muswell Press LGBTQ+ list

A facsimile guide to the Gents Loos of London, with map endpapers, published originally in 1937 by Routledge. Two members of a Gentleman’s Club begin a conversation over a copy of the Sanitary World and Drainage Observer. The discussion turns to where "relief" may be obtained after drinking tea or lager when walking the streets of London. We are told that the "places that have no attendants afford excellent rendezvous to people who wish to meet out of doors and yet escape the eye of the Busy (police)." The book could be read at as an entertaining, straightforward guide to London’s public conveniences but yet to our more skeptical eye it is patently a guide to where men could meet like-minded men in an era when homosexuality was illegal. It remains a classic whether taken at face value or not.

Author Biography

Paul Pry was the pseudonym of Thomas Burke, author of the highly-acclaimed Limehouse Nights and Nights in Town. Several of his short stories became films directed by D. W. Griffith. He died in London in 1945.