In 1935, the year Klaw took over the Manhattan bookstore that would later become Movie Star News, Guyette — by then already well established in mail order and also a frequent contributor to legendary pre-war fetish publication London Life — was sent to prison for a year for ‘misusing the US Mail system’.

Upon release he did not relinquish his ‘illegal’ activities, but he did, prudently, cease performing them under his own name. While publicly trading as a burlesque costumier (he became known as ‘King of the G-Strings’) he continued his fetish publishing work under an endless variety of pseudonyms.

Given how many aliases he employed to avoid further trouble with the law, it is perhaps not surprising that so little of his work was ever properly credited — either by Guyette himself or others who published it. And as Seves implies, this must surely help to explain his relative obscurity.

The author reveals that aside from the more obvious types of fetish imagery, Guyette also fetishised female boxers and wrestlers (pre-empting and perhaps even influencing Stanton, whose later photographic work featured much wrestling and face-sitting imagery).

We learn that by the late 1940s Guyette was acting as costumier on many Klaw shoots, especially those involving extreme fetish boots.

When John Willie (John Alexander Scott Coutts) arrived in America from Canada in 1946, Guyette introduced him to key US fetish people. They included Robert Harrison, who started publishing Willie’s Sweet Gwendoline cartoon serial in 1947, and collector ‘Little John’, “who inspired/sponsored Klaw’s full-blown entry into the fetish art business in 1948”.

Guyette also collaborated with Leonard Burtman, whose launch in the mid’50s of Exotique magazine made him into a major fetish player. Burtman, says Seves, made extensive use of (mostly uncredited) Guyette photographs not only for his magazine, but also for everything from costume catalogues to (fake) personal ads.

Seves reckons that 1960 was the last year Guyette’s advertisements appeared in publications of any kind, and that sometime in that same decade he switched to dealing in exotic animals.

Shortly before his death in 1976 he was interviewed by Bélier Press publisher JB Rund, the man behind last December’s fetish publishing tour de force, Possibilities: The Photographs of John Willie.

Charles Guyette’s work featured in several of the mag-book style publications put out by Bélier during that decade’s enthusiast revival of imagery from the ‘vintage’ years. Rund was also one of the few author/publishers attempting to credit the true source of the material.

But those Bélier originals are like gold dust today, so it’s wonderful that the arrival of Richard Pérez Seves’ book finally puts the record straight on Charles Guyette for our modern times. It’s not hard to support his contention that without Guyette “the fetish world would not exist as it does today”.

And with this book’s ridiculously low price of $9.99 (CreateSpace) or £7.68 (Amazon UK), I doubt any important gap in fetish art history has ever been filled more affordably!

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