About Men Only

Men Only

Men Only is a British magazine published in London, England, that has one of the longest and most changeable histories of any British men's title. It originated in 1935 as a pocket-sized general-interest magazine for men, became a standard-sized pin-up magazine in the 1950s, and was relaunched in 1971 by Paul Raymond Publications as a softcore pornographic magazine. Remarkably, the same title has therefore existed in three distinct forms across nine decades, and it continues to be published monthly, in print and digital formats, within the Paul Raymond stable.

Men Only is sold in most British newsagents, with some larger retailers requiring it to be sold in a modesty bag, and it is listed among the active titles of its publisher alongside Mayfair, Club International, Escort, Men's World and Razzle. Its current editor is listed as Matt Berry.

The Pearson Pocket Magazine, 1935

Men Only was founded in 1935 by C. Arthur Pearson Ltd, at that point an imprint of George Newnes Ltd. It was a pocket magazine, measuring about four and a half by six and a half inches, a format it shared with its better-known rival Lilliput. Its first issue declared its editorial position in uncompromising terms, announcing that it did not want women readers and would not have them, and that it sought bright articles on current male topics.

Humour stood at the heart of the early magazine, but from the start it also carried fiction — including work by P. G. Wodehouse — wide-ranging articles, and plates of art nudes. The scholar Justin Bengry has written a study of the magazine's first years, examining how the young Men Only courted its male consumers in the later 1930s.

Covers, Cartoons and Illustrators

The early covers were text-only. They then carried caricatures of famous people until the middle of 1958, when photographic covers took over. Photographers for the title included John Everard and Joan Craven. Inside, a page of colour illustrations of models, labelled Let's Join the Ladies, carried work by artists such as Archie Dickens, Blas Gallego and David Wright, alongside Vargas, whose pin-ups were familiar from Esquire in the United States.

Cartoons were a major part of the Pearson magazine's appeal. Its illustrators included Belsky, Antonia Yeoman, Carl Giles, Frank Hoar, Keith Waite and Bernard Hollowood. R. J. Minney edited the magazine in the 1950s. The combination of jokes, cartoons, fiction and pin-up art made Men Only a characteristic product of the British pocket-magazine era, when small-format monthlies sold in very large numbers.

Height of Popularity and the IPC Years

When Pearson closed The Strand Magazine in 1950, The Economist criticised the company for concentrating its resources on London Opinion and Men Only. In 1954 Men Only absorbed London Opinion — the magazine famous for the 1914 Lord Kitchener cover — and relaunched itself in a racier style. The magazine reached the height of its popularity in 1955, when some issues ran to 200 pages.

Newnes and Pearson became part of the International Publishing Corporation in 1959–1960, taking Men Only into IPC. In 1960 Men Only took over Lilliput, the rival pocket title that had always been better known. But the whole pocket sector was being squeezed by television, and Men Only was also losing readers to Haymarket's Man About Town and to the imported Playboy. In 1963 it adopted a larger format and more pin-ups, while reducing its frequency to bimonthly.

The City Magazines Period, 1965–1971

IPC sold Men Only to City Magazines in 1965. City was already publishing the pin-up magazines Carnival, Escort and Parade, and under its ownership Men Only returned to a monthly schedule, though it remained mainly black-and-white inside with a colour pin-up centre spread. Cartoonists published during this period included Ian Miller, Paul Sample and Pete Dredge. The City years were a bridge between the old general-interest pocket magazine and the explicit top-shelf title Men Only was about to become.

Paul Raymond and the 1971 Relaunch

In 1971 Paul Raymond, who ran nightclubs in London's Soho, acquired Men Only and relaunched it as a softcore pornographic magazine — the foundation stone of the top-shelf publishing empire he went on to build. The relaunch raised circulation to a reported 400,000 copies a month in 1972. Through the 1970s and 1980s Men Only was the main competitor to Fisk Publishing's Mayfair as well as to American magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse; Raymond later took over Mayfair itself in 1990, uniting the two rivals.

Early issues of Raymond's Men Only often included serious articles and interviews, but from the 1980s these were largely omitted as the photographic content took over. Centre models were billed as the Men Only Girl or Men Only Miss. Photographers included Fred Enke, R. B. Kane, Harrison Marks and Bob Carlos Clarke, and later Bob Twigg. Models who appeared included Mary Millington, Jo Guest, Anette Dawn, Linsey Dawn McKenzie and Bobbi Eden; many also appeared in different shoots in Raymond's Club International. The writer Nicholas Whittaker worked for the title in the 1970s before his later career at other top-shelf magazines.

Ownership Changes Since 2012

In September 2012 Paul Chaplin purchased the Paul Raymond Publications stable of magazines, including Men Only and Mayfair, on behalf of the Blue Media Publishing Group; the publisher is now associated with Blue Active Media Ltd. Blue Publishing entered administration a year later, in 2013, but the magazines continued publication. Men Only is sold in digital format at the main Paul Raymond website; digital sales initially ran through a dedicated Paul Raymond digital newsstand from 2013 until that site closed.

The publisher's lawyers scrutinise the content of its magazines before publication to ensure likely compliance with the Obscene Publications Act 1959, since British law does not allow hardcore imagery to be sold on newsstands. That legal framework has defined the softcore character of Men Only throughout its modern life.

The Modern Magazine

Today Men Only appears monthly as one of the Paul Raymond titles, published every cycle alongside Club International, Escort, Mayfair, Men's World and Razzle. Its format is that of the modern British top shelf: photographic sets of established glamour models form the core of each issue, with the editorial matter that once distinguished the Raymond relaunch largely absent. It is available in most newsagents, subject in some larger stores to the modesty-bag requirement, and in digital editions online.

The continuity of the title should not be overstated — almost nothing of the 1935 pocket magazine survives in the modern Men Only except the name and the male readership it addresses — but the survival of the name itself, through Pearson, IPC, City Magazines, Paul Raymond Publications and their successors, is a genuine publishing phenomenon.

Historical Significance

Histories of British men's magazines treat Men Only as a central case study. Magforum's survey of a century of men's magazines notes that in the 1950s Men Only, Lilliput, Man About Town and other men's lifestyle magazines sold in their hundreds of thousands each month, yet publishers later let most of them wither; Men Only was one of the few titles relaunched for the top shelf by Paul Raymond and thus carried into a second life. Its pre-war and wartime issues are also used by social historians, including Bengry's research on the magazine and its consumers in 1935–39.

Few British magazines of any kind can show a comparable arc: launched between the wars as a pocket miscellany of humour, fiction and cartoons; absorbing two famous rivals, London Opinion and Lilliput; reaching 200-page issues at its mid-1950s peak; and then reinvented, under the same name, as a foundation of Britain's softcore publishing industry. Men Only's ninety-year history is, in miniature, a history of the British men's magazine itself.