S-H-O-P-P-I-N-G, we're shopping...

Some practical footwear...



A game for all the family...



Something inspirational...



And a little ornament for the garden...

Philately or Fellatio?

A nipple, shapely buttocks and a muscular, moustachioed man smoking a cigarette – a new set of three stamps, to be issued in Finland in September, are among the most daring ever seen in the philatelic world. The images are by Tom of Finland, the legendary artist who was born in south-west Finland in 1920, and died in 1991. He created an archive of erotica with a distinct aesthetic – vast-shouldered men in leather, denim and knee-high boots – that is said to have influenced figures including Robert Mapplethorpe, Freddie Mercury and the Village People.

The male portraits on the Finnish stamps aren't the most explicit of the artist's work. His art very often pays tribute to a tumescence absent in the images chosen for these stamps. The Tom of Finland Foundation has said his early process often involved "locking himself in his room, stripping naked, and stroking himself with one hand while the other hand created on paper what he could seldom find on the streets".

Even so, they are considerably more erotic than those usually seen on any nation's envelopes. Dean Shepherd, editor of Gibbons Stamp Monthly, says that he has never seen homoerotic art on stamps before. Erotic art more generally? "No, it tends to be nude paintings reproduced on stamps, but as far as actual erotic art is concerned, I think this is the first time." There was a bit of a storm in the early 1930s, he says, when the Spanish Postal Authority approved some stamps featuring Goya's The Nude Maja – a woman reclining naked. The US government apparently barred and returned any mail that bore it.

Stamps represent a country, and are the most public of media, so they rarely feature strongly sexual subjects, says Matt Hill, editor of Stamp and Coin Mart. When paying tribute to LGBT culture, it's more usual for stamps to depict gay heroes.

Read more in The Guardian

Tea lovers

“I know my little ‘dirty drawings’ are never going to hang in the main salons of the Louvre, but it would be nice if - I would like to say ‘when,’ but I better say ‘if’ - our world learns to accept all the different ways of loving. Then maybe I could have a place in one of the smaller side rooms.”
- Tom of Finland, 1991

Creator of the greatest "über-masculine" homoerotic art in the late 20th century, Tom of Finland is now considered an artistic, as well as erotic genius - his work appears on the walls of such esteemed establishments as New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as on t-shirts, numerous prints and books, and on this rather marvellous tea service...









[I know I have featured it before, but it is my 50th birthday this year - hint, hint!]

Touko Laaksonen aka Tom of Finland (8th May 1920 – 7th November 1991)

Tom of Finland Foundation for the protection, preservation and promotion of erotic art.