In the late 1990s and early 2000s, just before stopping publishing books, The Erotic Print Society produced a number of erotic classic texts in their Scarlet Library, each with newly-commissioned illustrations (probably the last time any publisher undertook such an exercise). Included in the series was the BDSM standard Beatrice, for which Lynn Paula Russell was asked to produce illustrations. Unfortunately the paper quality did not lend itself to her fine pencil work, but we have included this portfolio as Russell’s swansong to a genre she made uniquely her own.

Here is Clifford Dorset’s five-star Librarything review of Beatrice: ‘Beatrice is one of the best-known classics of erotic literature, one which specialises in the portrayal of erotic chastisement, and in this Scarlet Library edition it has been illustrated by one of the best exponents of chastisement artwork currently active. Paula Russell’s depictions of young ladies suffering distress to their exposed nether regions, and enjoying other erotic attentions, are amongst the best available, and this volume offers more than a dozen. The story begins with Beatrice leaving her husband following a three-way erotic encounter with his stepmother, but the reasons for the separation are left unclear. She returns home as her father is about to leave for India, but before he goes he spanks her erotically and leaves her with a whip, as well as with ill-defined indications of an illicit relationship with her younger sister. His brother, her uncle, invites her to visit his house, and he takes up where her father left off, again with sensuous behaviour, albeit short of incest. His own wife and daughter, as well as her sister and a family friend, are complicit in her entrapment in voluptuous goings on, and soon she finds herself and her sister being undressed and tied up for chastisement with a leather strap before being dressed in scanty, transparent clothing and paraded in manacles before being enjoyed by strange men. Another young woman is introduced, and treated in similar fashion. Beatrice and her sister, their bottoms naked, are whipped with a riding crop as they ride horses in a circle. The majority of the erotic tableaux, described in the book at a luxurious pace, involve tying women to various kinds of frame, and undressing them before beating them with birches or straps.’