Goodnight, ladies

Last Monday as I tolerated the rude fact of my 37th birthday, a sex industry insider phoned me and said that the Erotic Review had folded. I was relieved. Seeing the journal I nurtured for eight years in the hands of porn mag professionals was like seeing your puppy sold to a group of vivisectionists.

Last Monday as I tolerated the rude fact of my 37th birthday, a sex industry insider phoned me and said that the Erotic Review had folded. I was relieved. Seeing the journal I nurtured for eight years in the hands of porn mag professionals was like seeing your puppy sold to a group of vivisectionists.

The timing of the Review's collapse was poignant. It was exactly a decade ago that art dealers Jamie Maclean and Tim Hobart first issued a newsletter to several thousand customers of the Erotic Print Society, or EPS as it more discretely appeared on your bank statements. I knew about the Society because Jamie, son of the dashing soldier and secret agent Sir Fitzroy Maclean, was a great mate of a former boyfriend of mine. I adored Jamie who, in the time-honoured fashion of the British upper classes, combined a dauntingly patrician manner with great personal charm, humour and some endearingly low-brow tastes, such as pubs and porn.

Jamie's business partner Tim was a more flamboyant character, who often came across as a classic dilettante - although this was not the case, because of an incurable allergy to sincerity. When Jamie and Tim were in full flow discussing some naked beauty's "magnificent bush" or "exquisite fanny", there was the unmistakeable whiff of gentlemen's clubs and claret in the air. A woman who met them at the Frankfurt Book Fair once said to me, "Those two blokes you work with - they're the two fat ladies of porn, right?" She was right.

And it was the intoxicating waywardness of the EPS proprietors and office, lodged in two dusty rooms above a Fulham wine merchants, that first lured me into erotica. Jamie asked me if I would man the phones one busy Christmas and I never quite left. I found the full-frontal, wobbly-thighed, non-PC openness to sexual allure deeply refreshing after a short stint working on GQ.

In 1996 lad culture was very much in the ascendant. Eva Herzigova's flawless breasts were everywhere and porn took its cues from Baywatch's silicone-enhanced blonde fest. It was not surprising that a sizeable body of people nationwide began to feel nostalgic for a saucier, larger-rumped era, when a man could flirt outrageously with a corseted strumpet and not get carted off by the sex police.

Naturally this movement's core members tended to be middle-aged male professionals and retired military men, but a surprising number of women swelled the ranks. In particular many younger women were sick of the beery, footie-mad lad with his entreaties for anal sex, threesomes and lesbian jelly-wrestling. These were the kind of girls who flocked to the newly-established Agent Provocateur to buy its delectable retro undies, and over the years I employed a succession of such well-upholstered females. I once overheard a bike courier say to his controller on the phone after catching the Erotic Review girls on a particularly bosomy day, "You've got to get me out of here, mate, before I go blind." It did occur to me that I was the most criminally sexist pig in the history of bosses, since I only seemed to employ girls who took at least a double-D cup.

Before I arrived in the EPS office, Jamie and Tim had invented a female persona, Emily Ford, to sign their mail-shots and letters. They cannily realised most people would far rather buy erotica from a well-spoken young woman than two middle-aged men. Jamie told me that Emily was basked on the bookseller in The Big Sleep, and was the kind of girl who when you took off her glasses, let down her hair and removed her tweed suit would shag you like a crazed vixen.

When I started answering phones in the office customers assumed that I was Emily and it seemed churlish to protest. Being Emily perked me up no end, "Yes Mr Fotheringaye, the volume does include detailed, and if I might say, rather delightful pictures of rear entry." But the fun really started when Jamie handed over to me the editorship of the Erotic Print Society Review, eight pages of cream cartridge paper (no staples), with articles ranging from "Watteau's Place in the History of Erotic Art" to "The Best Nipples in Town". Barry Humphries contributed a piece on "Erotic Diplomacy" to issue 2 and I soon found it was surprisingly easy to persuade celebrated authors to pull something saucy from their bottom drawer.

Soon I was receiving unsolicited offerings from vice-loving libertines and the odd cheque to support our "work", and it occured to me that we had the makings of a proper, self-supporting magazine. With the naivety of the blithering amateur I phoned up Waterstone's and persuaded them to allow us to place magazines on their front desks in selected London stores - in return they could keep the cover price. An acquaintance wrote up the story for the Sunday Telegraph, and by Monday I was on Radio 4's World at One talking about orgasms. Within two months we had sold 20,000 copies. Responses trebled when we used a delicately-drawn image of a peachy rump. After a rumpus when our ad was placed near the Telegraph crossword, we used a more discreet picture of a generous bosom spilling out of a brassiere. I had a surreal conversation with Charles Moore, then Telegraph editor, about which picture was in truth the ruder.

The magazine reached a circulation high of 30,000 copies. Auberon Waugh was a huge supporter and used to sweep me round grand parties saying, "Rowan runs a very important magazine, you must write for it". Contributors were paid in dirty prints and drink. Our Erotic Review lunches became famous for diversions such as handcuffing my future deputy, Annie Blinkhorn, to a chair and lightly lashing her with a cat-o-nine-tails.

The likes of Barry Humphries, Boris Johnson, Alain de Botton, Philip Hensher, Wendy Holden and Stephen Bayley attended lunches and contributed. Our parties became known for fan-dancers and girls in corsets. But the festivities were interrupted by business worries. We were people with a passion for literature and the visual image, but not so fond of spreadsheets. Jamie and Tim decided to sell the magazine and I asked them to hold off the sharks while I tried to raise funds.

I found a business partner and we acquired the magazine - plus debts - for a pound. Although we gathered 10,000 new subscriptions in just under a year, we could never quite nose ahead of our debt. We tried every stunt: the entire female staff stripped to their scanties for a photo-shoot; the chatelaine of Soho's literary private members club, The Academy, was persuaded to engage in a lesbian kiss with an actress for our summer front cover. We published the first short story by Booker rogue DBC Pierre. These things brought readers but we were still short of funds. It became clear that our only realistic hope of survival was a bigger magazine publisher. I went on bended knee and in Vivienne Westwood bustier to see Felix Dennis, the only man I thought brave enough to consider a magazine that did not shy away from erections, orgies and women who love their dogs too much. We even printed one of his poems.

Six months later we were installed in Dennis Towers. The redesigned magazine looked far sleeker, our budgets were increased and we started paying writers in cash, but in becoming more polished we lost something of the original charm. In fairness, I also did something that a proper, dutiful erotic editrice should never do - get myself pregnant.

I was about to return from maternity leave when I learnt that the Erotic Review had been sold to the publishers of Penthouse, who planned to base the magazine in Cobham. My staff and I resigned. Almost every writer and illustrator who had ever worked for us refused to contribute to the new incarnation, a dispiriting and ill-subbed mix of the usual fetish and S&M musings that are widely available elsewhere. I couldn't imagine a single one of my readers enjoying it - and it seems they haven't.