Islington Now talks to Dave, the eccentric owner of Rambooks Vintage Erotica on Holloway Road, who collects and sells unwanted erotic magazines.
Unassuming as its shopfront may be, Rambooks Vintage Erotica is not closed – even if the products it sells may not be to everyone’s taste. Should you walk past on a Tuesday or Friday, it’s possible to venture into what looks like a long-abandoned shop, and indulge your wildest fantasies in row after row of colourful relics of a bygone golden age of erotic print.
As the eccentric persona at its helm, Dave (who doesn’t like his surname being in the public domain) got his start when his mum got him a job at his uncle’s sex shop in Soho in the 70s. After a short stint working at Rambooks, a rival sex shop nearby, Dave got the rights to the name and inherited its stock. He started webuyanyporn.com in 2012 and opened his shop on Holloway Road in 2015.
The website connects Dave to those looking to get rid of their erotic magazines. He gets calls from family members clearing their great uncle’s wardrobe, or from grieving daughters who just discovered their father’s stash under his death bed. When he’s not behind his shop counter, Dave drives around the country gathering collections of unwanted mags and meeting the most bizarre of characters.
Although most of the calls he gets are “more sad than strange”, he “once got a call from a vicar”. His largest haul? Thirty thousand magazines in a single home.
The rarer pieces in Dave’s shop go for up to £300, but the damaged section in the front offers magazines for a charitable donation of the buyer’s choice: Help our Heroes, Macmillan Cancer Support, or Cancer care.
The shop’s collection caters for a large range of fetishes: “From rubber, bondage, spanking, foot fetish, female domination, body art, and everything in between,” says Dave.
Although he has a website and uses Google Maps, his shop remains pretty hard to find. Somehow, word of mouth provides all the marketing he needs, and he’s been noticed by magazines of the likes of i-D and Vice.
In the parallel universe that is Dave’s semi-basement, the greatest surprise of all is that the clientele is increasingly varied, and nowadays, increasingly feminine. “We get far more women in the shop than men. They are interested in the past fashion and lifestyle, reclaiming their sexuality and making it their own,” says Dave.
Although Dave admits that he sometimes doesn’t feel like opening his shop, it’s worth a visit to be met with the iconic character that catalogues his collections with thorough enjoyment.
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Highbury patch reporter, photographer, polyglot, student journalist specialising in political and social movement reporting.