Yarns Without Threads

I am indebted to John Bevis, who responded to a post of mine on newsgroup uk.rec.naturist, by pointing me to the list of books posted to newsgroup rec.nude by Boyd Bechtel in 1997. You can see both John Bevis's and Boyd Bechtel's posts in Google's Usenet archive. ("Usenet" is a huge collection of "newsgroups", where people post messages and comments on the messages of others. It predates the Web, and most of it is pure text - no images or formatting at all.)

Charles Daney's excellent Website, including extensive lists of books relating to naturism, is now at <http://www.naturistplace.com/>. This URL replaces his previous URLs <http://cgd.best.vwh.net/home/naturism/> and <http://www.mbay.net/~cgd/naturism/> - if you have any bookmarks pointing into the latter two areas you should update them (the directory structure of the new site is identical to the old ones). The site contains a very wide range of information, opinions and resources for naturists, and is highly recommended.

In developing this part of NUFF, I have received help and advice from the rest of the NUFF team. As the pages have been developed, this assistance and support has continued. For the latest update I am indebted to Jules RW for more useful leads and recommendations, to Nick Alímonos, who supplied new artworks related to his novel, to Malcolm Boura who provided suggestions and a book, and, particularly, to Charles Daney, who supplied suggestions for books to be included, a range of information about naturism in fiction, and full information on John Ball's naturist identity as Donald Johnson.

Dave Linton deserves special mention. He was the first to pass on the URL for Charles Daney's page about nudity in science fiction, has made a lot of useful suggestions, including many designed to make it easier to navigate and view the site, and continues to unearth titles to be added or investigated. However, all problems and difficulties presented to the reader - including violations of compatibility standards - are definitely of my creation, and nothing to do with Dave.

The lady in the background is derived from “The Reader”, which appears in The Naked Truth About Nudism by William Welby, first published in 1935. Unlike most of the photos in that book, this one is uncredited, so I assume it was taken by the author.

Many of the images on Yarns Without Threads pages were derived from scans. To obtain a good starting scan, it is very helpful to know the halftone dot frequency of the printing, otherwise several scans at different resolutions are required followed by careful scrutiny. To make life easier, I obtained a very useful little gadget. The "Silk Screen Mesh and Halftone Screen Analyzer" is produced by GEI International Inc of Syracuse. Item code CNF-1401A costs US$4.65 plus postage to UK of US$3.00 for a single unit. Highly recommended.

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In particular:

The first of the books detailed in these pages that I read was Leslie Charteris's The Saint Around The World. At the time it seemed quite a novelty that naturism could feature in a story that wasn't attempting to be either sexy or titillating. As I managed to find more such fiction, I began to wonder whether Charteris was alone in producing a good quality story where naturism was more than incidental. Then I encountered Adam Mars-Jones's Summer Lightning, which I still regard as the first story to be truly about naturism. In all the others, naturism is part of the scenery. Often it forms a very important part, and can be portrayed accurately and perceptively. But in Summer Lightning, naturism is almost one of the characters. Maybe one day another accomplished author will outdo Mars-Jones, but with naturist fiction so rare, this is perhaps a long way in the future. Meanwhile, I hope you will enjoy sampling the delights on offer.

Many of the books dealt with on this site are out of print - but are often available relatively cheaply through online dealers. I acquired most of mine via ABE - an excellent online portal to secondhand bookdealers around the world. Don't think you can get hold of them through a library. None of the books on Boyd Bechtel's list are held by any public library in Hampshire. I no longer include links to online or other booksellers, partly because these companies are well-known, partly because I can't be bothered to set up a click-through advertising arrangement and see no reason why they should get free publicity, partly because the service when buying less-common titles can be poor.

The generic title for this set of Webpages has been chosen deliberately so that non-fiction can be included, but the many histories of and commentaries on naturism can be left out. Plenty of other Websites can provide reading lists for those wanting to find factual information on naturism in particular cultures, periods or countries. I have no intention of attempting to reinvent those wheels - the object is to provide collated and cross-referenced information unavailable elsewhere.

It is interesting - and not just to me - that science fiction provides such a substantial number of the entries here, and on Charles Daney's site. Of course, given that the "what if" underlying most (all?) fiction is allowed a vastly greater range of options in sf, one might reasonably expect a larger proportion of stories of societies where social nudity was accepted or common. Another factor might derive from Allen Lane's suggestion that dustjacket nudity increases sales, and the sf pulp magazines certainly exhibited much female flesh on their covers. However, despite the general lack of clothing for these usually pneumatic damsels, they were rarely totally nude - and the cover hardly ever depicted a scene from anything inside the magazine! In my view, the greater preponderance of nudity in sf derives from the fact that the genre is, or attempts to be, scientific in approach. When trying to construct hypothetical alternative cultures and societies, the sf author will usually apply a variety of logical processes to determine the consequences of the originating "what if?" situation or postulate. Since, as naturists are well aware, there is no logical reason for clothing besides comfort, protection and adornment, a hypothetical society devised by logical processes is more likely than not to be naturist. Another explanation is that a naturist society is immediately identifiable as different, forcing the reader to discard a whole slew of presumptions about what constitutes "normality" or "acceptable" behaviour. A final possibility is that, with no clothes to worry about, to write about, to invent, the sf short story writer can devote a lot more of his or her alloted five thousand words to the core of the "what if?" and its consequences. Other suggestions - serious or otherwise - will be gratefully received - thanks for those already sent in. Just don't expect this paragraph to turn into a doctoral thesis. (But if there is such a thesis out there...)

Secondary or subsidiary theses could also be produced dealing with two other aspects of the lists. First, detective stories run SF a close second - and far outpace it if one considers only those tales with specific mentions of naturism. I have some thoughts on this, and will enlarge on them in some future version of this page. Second, there's a bulge in the timeline in the 1930s. This seems rather larger than might be expected simply as a result of the initial flowering of organised nudism in Germany and naturism in England at that time. Again, I hope to put forward some possible explanations in the future.

I have rated each story for nudity and naturism, and as a good read. The first is relatively objective - the others increasingly subjective - your opinions may differ! The graphics and their meaning are shown below - ‘Presumed rating’ applies where I haven't read the book, so am working on the opinions of others and my own assumptions:

Nudity
My rating	Presumed rating	Amount of nudity
		Rare or very little
		Occasional or infrequent
		Lots!
Naturist nudity
My rating	Presumed rating	Naturism or social nudity content
		Glimpses, or the nudity isn't particularly naturist
		Occasional naturism or similar social nudity
		Lots of naturism or other social nudity
A good read?
My rating	Presumed rating	Should you read this book?
		Not really, unless you like that sort of thing
		Reasonable, give it a try
		Good or excellent, recommended

Some of the tales described in these Webpages come from well-defined genres, SF and detective/crime fiction being two which are well represented. Some others, such as Bellamy's The Nudists and Eppie's Gone Wild might be considered "pornography". I have avoided that description, if only because Gone Wild is cited as an example of "erotica" by The University of Alberta, which distinguishes the two: "Erotica explores thought and imagery related to what is sexual. It is distinct from pornography in that pornography aims solely at physical arousal, but erotica incorporates a story and character to engage the reader's thought and emotion regarding desire. Accordingly, erotica is very diverse in subject matter. It is explicit, and provocative, but not necessarily graphic; where pornography just tells, erotica aims to show and evoke." Now you know. Smut is something else again - and I suggest the Timothy Lea Confessions series qualifies for that category.

Last updated 2006 April 23.
 
Copyright © 1997-2006 NUFF and Tim Forcer