Janus and Gordon Sergeant

The Janus shop in London has sadly closed its doors and the outfit now runs as an on-line enterprise only. Looking at the website there must be some doubt as to how long even that will continue since it looks pretty amateurish, but let's wish them luck.

The site contains a jokey eulogy to Gordon Sergeant, the fictional editor of Janus. The character was dreamed up because the Janus contact magazine needed a name to put on its cover and someone thought of that name.

The Janus magazine was headed by Paul van Ocker until his death in the early 1980s. Shortly before that happened Janus set up a contact magazine called Privilege, which in those days was a duplicated A6 magazine which came out quarterly and was only available on subscription. The half dozen or so pages of each issue were taken up with contact adverts, but the inside front cover always had a message from Gordon Sergeant, as editor. Later when Janus starting running spanking parties this figure was the advertised organiser, and it became a standing joke at every Janus event to see what the latest excuse was to explain his non-attendance.

We can understand why Janus decided to announce his death because it allows them to look forward to their on-line future under his equally mythical nephew, Tarquin. (God know why porn merchants want to pretend that they are all to the the manor born. The only manor this lot ever knew were the dreary suburbs of outer London.) The problem is that the Janus site would have been fine a decade ago, but today it is so far behind the times as to be laughable. To make matters worse the site is still unfinished, with links going nowhere and text that is badly in need of an editor who has English as a first language. An online shop for (sic) purveyors of erotica to consenting adults -  Alan van Ockers would never have allowed such a mangled bastardisation of the tongue.

Still and for all that this is still Janus and we wish them well. It is just that on the basis of when we have seen so far the site will shortly follow Gordon Sergeant into oblivion.