This Article has been transferred from the mitchmen website
Many of the Royale images in circulation today have numbers in their corners.
They have various formats, but what do they represent?
1. Numbers in White Boxes
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| Royale Studio - Catalogue Thumbnail Sheet for set 'W' |
'
Numbers
in bold characters which appear inside a square, white box in the
bottom left corner are Royale's own numbers, used on their thumbnail
sheets to show the sequence of the pictures and for customers to
reference when ordering full size prints.
I've
yet to identify the soldier seen undressing in front of a mirror and
getting down to exercise in Catalogue 'W'. It's a fairly typical Royale
set with a genuine service uniform paired with Royale's ultra tight
shorts. The routine of getting different 'real' men to perform the same,
slightly embarrassing, erotic ritual is part of the appeal of Royale
Studio's work.
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Royale Studio - Navy Gash 08
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Thumbnail pictures often turn up on their own having been cropped from the full sheet,
sometimes apparently with scissors!
The quality can be surprisingly good for samples.
~
2. Numbers Inside White Circles
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Royale Sailor Punished in Shorts 2
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A lot of other pictures have smaller numbers inside little circles in the bottom left corner.
Clearly
401 isn't a sequence number within a set, they usually only comprised
16 - 24 pictures. They can't be Royale's unique identification numbers
either, the values are too low for that. The ones I have only go up to 401 but
Royale produced dozens of sets. There are 117 sets in the Catalogue
Sheets I have, representing something like 3000 pictures.
So what are these circled numbers?
I collected together all the
'circle' pictures in my possession. There were 45 altogether, good
quality scans of original photographs. Straightaway I could see from the
filenames that they all came from the 'Originals' collection
which was controversially released to the internet some years ago.
Pictures in beefcake magazines in Royale's time (1959-63) do not have these numbers, although one turned up later.
This points to an obvious answer, that these are simply the
numbers that a collector used to identify the photographs he owned.
~
Do these numbers tell us anything about the sets they belong to?
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Royale Sailor Punished in Shorts 1
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In Royale 01, 'More Sailors in the Rigging' there
is another photo, seemingly from the same set as 401, but
numbered 391 (see above). Does this mean there are 9 pictures between
these two in the original set?
Well,
no, because in the 'circles group', there are two pictures from other
sets with numbers in-between 391 and 401, including the one below, 394, which clearly doesn't belong.
.jpg) |
| Royale - Footballer Punished |
Just
this one example tells us that the numbering is not meaningful. So even
where there are 'runs' of pictures that look connected (e.g. a
run of four images numbered 331-334 in Royale 93 Sailors Caned) that doesn't tell us for sure that they appear in that sequence, nor even that they are in the same set.
It's
possible they were numbered in the order of their acquisition. Then
small groupings of related images would occur naturally, chosen from the
thumbnail sheets like 'W' above.
~
3. Numbers inside Black Boxes
There
is a further small group of 6 pictures which have white numbers inside
black boxes, always accompanied by a star. These too can be traced back
to the 'Originals' collection
It
looks as if these stars have come from a sticker sheet (notice how it
overlaps the number). The numbers are probably stickers too (this is
pre-computers, remember!).
The circled numbers just discussed are probably also stickers, because
the numbers on them slant at various angles. Perhaps sheets of numbered
stickers were specially produced in those days for collectors of all
sorts and I guess businesses would have a use for them too.
As
it happens, the picture above (107) from 'Sailors in the Rigging' also
exists with circle style numbering - and it's a different number, 279
(see below).
The
existence of duplicate copies with different numbers confirms that the
numbering isn't meaningful. It also suggests that they were originally from
two different collections which ended up being merged to form the
'Originals'. These photos were considered to be porn and were publicly
unsaleable through normal channels, so passing on complete collections
to other, like-minded individuals was the only safe way of disposing of
them. That was how collections came to be merged.
Sailor
Al told me that he acquired most of his collection from a man who had
worked with 'Guys in Uniform' Studio and had previously been connected
with Royale. That might explain the large size of the collection. It's
possible
he may have rescued them when they were raided or wound up.
Thanks
to this provenance, the 'Originals' collection also includes a number
of pictures from Guys in Uniform Studio (confusingly, these scans have
been given filenames with MIU numbers, standing for Men In Uniform). Two of
these, that I know of, have 'black square' numbers in their corners, see below.
It's not a purely Royale phenomenon.
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| A 'Guys in Uniform' image with a black, corner reference number, 47 |
This seems to prove conclusively that the numbers were put on the pictures by a collector.
~
Postscript
%20Bonhams%200.jpg) |
| Royale Models photo in Bonham's Auction |
Collecting
all my numbered Royale pictures into one folder for this investigation
threw up one completely unexpected result. I found some of them were
duplicated by images I had acquired quite recently from the catalogue of
a sale of Basil Clavering pictures
at Bonhams (Jun 2021). Five images reproduced in the Bonhams' listing
had circled numbers in their corners and 3 of them duplicated images I
already had (the one shown above was one I didn't have).
It
seems this sale must have been of Sailor Al's 'Originals'
collection. The provenance Bonhams gave closely matches the story I had
been told by him (see above).
The
sale raised £22,000 for around 850 prints plus negatives etc. About a
third of that amount was the buyer's premium (the auction house's
commission). I don't know who the actual seller was in the end, but I
hope the new owner of these pictures will share more of them with us
all.
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%20Bonhams%200.jpg)
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