By Peter Berton

CYBERSPACE – There is something alluring about vintage porn, from classic Playboy magazines to the stag films of old and the earliest photos and movies. Granted, the firm breasts in the photos may not be as firm as the augmented bosoms of today, but back in the day they were spectacular.

Delta of Venus is dedicated to the notion that some porn, like fine wine, just gets better with age. Quantity also doesn’t hurt: At posting time, the site contained thousands of antique photos and more than 85 hours of continuous footage, plus erotic novels and art. An affiliate program pays webmasters a 50-percent recurring revenue share for spreading the word.

Robert is the vintage porn aficionado who started it all.

YNOT.com: What got you started down this unusual path?

Robert: I’m a writer, consultant and dilettante living in the U.S., and also a collector of antique smut. DeltaofVenus.com has been around since early 2002.

The collection is mostly films and photography running from the mid-1800s through the 1970s — artistic nudes and pin-ups through bona fide hardcore porn from many different countries and eras.

But where did the inspiration come from?

I was collecting vintage smut — photography and art to start, then film reels later — long before the website and found friends and colleagues expressing a lot of interest in the material. They provided lots of positive feedback. Part of [their fascination with the material] was the simple intrigue that explicit porn existed in generations past; others had an interest in the fashion or history. Many folks also explained they found some vintage erotica to be quite sexy, while modern porn missed the mark for them, which was part of the appeal for me, too.

With the classic stuff you have women with natural bodies, of course, and in my opinion there’s a certain genuine sensuality even in the more explicit material — something that’s missing from a lot of mainstream porn today, though there is some good stuff nowadays too. “Cum Guzzling Anal Sluts With Fake Tits Part 9” might work for some, but it just doesn’t do it for me.

I suspected there was a market out there [for the kind of porn I like] and launched Delta of Venus purely as a labor of love. As the site grew it became one of my main gigs, and here we are over a decade later.

Is there one particular kind of antique erotica in which the site specializes?

We try to cover all the bases.

Our crown jewel is probably the erotic film collection, which consists mostly of 8mm and 16mm reels that I’ve hand-restored and transferred to digital myself. We’ve got silent XXX flicks from the 1920s and 1930s, mid-century burlesque and stags and quite a bit from the 1960s and 1970s, which many have dubbed the Golden Era of Porn.

The photos run a bit farther back in time — pornographic prints and daguerreotypes from the 1800s through the Roaring Twenties, lots of risque Parisian postcards and pin-ups. From the early ’70s, we feature some fantastic XXX photo collections from long-forgotten sex mags and amateur shoots. Again, I do both physical restoration and digital touch-ups.

The archives also include classic erotic stories and novels, sex-related audio recordings taken from eight-track or vinyl — there’s some pretty amusing stuff — and erotic art.

Basically, if anything in my collection can be presented digitally, I’ll publish it sooner or later.

Much of your material is not only vintage, but also rare. How and where do you find it?

At first I had to hunt down vintage erotica in the usual ways: antique shows, collectors’ expos. eBay was a good venue when that came around, too.

My favorite was going to estate sales, sifting through all sorts of old belongings and tracking down someone’s porn stash from 60 years ago. Usually, these would be mixed in with other less controversial photos or magazines or movies, and the people doing sale would be totally unaware of their existence.

Eventually you get a sixth sense about where to find some old perv’s hidden collection, and it can be fun to have that detective work pay off with a long-forgotten porn cache amidst a bunch of old Popular Mechanics magazines or in a hat box or whatever.

These days, Delta of Venus is well-known enough that people contact us about selling their stuff. It’s rare that I’ll have to do the initial legwork unless there’s something specific I’m looking for, which does happen.

Probably our best acquisition so far this year was from a fellow in Chicago who recently bought a building that used to be a nightclub. While doing renovations, workers discovered a walled-off compartment that had been sealed since 1951, according to building records.

Inside were a bunch of antique pistols, some Italian fascist propaganda, two projectors and a massive stash of porn reels from the 1920s through about 1949. I purchased the reels; let him keep the guns and leaflets. The films probably are one of the largest collections of their kind in the world. I’m still working on restoring and transferring them to digital, but there’s some great stuff in there.

Given the various decades represented in the collection, have you noticed any consistent styles or approaches to creating porn? How have things changed over time?

From a technological perspective there are too many innovations to list, as you might expect.

I do dig the similarities in porn between then and now. You can watch a XXX reel from the 1930s and see the “plots” that are still recycled today: lonely housewife and TV repairman, though he would be a radio guy back then; boss and secretary; casting couch; naughty nurse … the list goes on. Just like in modern porn, most of them are ridiculous and extraneous to all the sex, but now and then something genuinely witty crops up.

Do all the older films and photos seem dated, or do some transcend time?

There are certain eras and styles that do seem to have a timeless sexiness about them. Those are actually my favorite types of images, and the ones I seek out above others — photos that you can almost imagine being taken today.

A lot of [the appeal in antique erotica is discovering] what fashions have endured through the years. Corsets, a lot of classic lingerie, equestrian boots — we have the Victorian and Edwardian eras to thank for those. The 1920s and 1930s, whether New York City or Weimar Berlin or Paris, also have a cross-generational appeal. And, of course, some mid-century models still have a modern allure to them: The Bettie Page look is probably even more popular today than it was for a 1950s audience.

Do you think the people who starred in the earliest films and photos, who are now either very old or deceased, would get a kick out of people still getting off on their work?

I like to think so!

One thing to keep in mind is that back then, especially before the mid-20th century, the ladies in these photos and movies were “all in” to the lifestyle. Most either were already prostitutes or were entrenched in the bohemian scene and fiercely independent. They didn’t care what proper society thought of them.

You just didn’t pose nude or have sex on film and remain in the mainstream, and in those days there was almost no crossover between the two worlds. Adult was your career for keeps, for better or worse. There wasn’t much space for regrets.

So yeah, I can’t imagine exactly what an early 1900s harlot from a Parisian brothel would think about 21st Century gentlemen wanking to her pics on something called a computer connected to something called the internet. Maybe she’d find a measure of satisfaction in being appreciated more than a century later, while her more respectable counterparts in polite society faded out of history. Or maybe she’d think, “Oui, I’ve still got it!”