• Join The Fed
• Advertise with The Fed

• About Us
• Contact

In This Issue

• The Mighty Hunter
• The Orphan: Victim or Commodity?
• Sex and the City, Victorian Style
• Choose Your Own Victorian Adventure!
• Letters to the Feditors
• Lay A (Caucasian) Burden Down
• Missives From My Mother
• A Cautionary Invective On Throttling One's Own Fowl
• Change Comes To Constants
• London's Burning!
• "Green Sickness": For That Vintage Venereal Burn
• Dear Fundamentalists: Get Down And Get With It
• Fed Sudoku Challenge!
• Connect-the-Dots
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 21.6

Connoisseurs of bodily Delights,
The cryptic Dots will guide your feather'd Quill,
But take heede where your inkey Nib alights,
And waver not but please, Sir, keepe it still!
 - Anon, 1879

Connect-the-dots (contemporarily known as ‘cunny constellations' or ‘points d'amour') were conceived as a method of bypassing obscenity laws in eighteenth-century Britain. Although they were commercially successful, the belief that their distributors were immune to arrest and seizure by the police was quickly proven false.  As William Lazenby, a contemporary publisher of illegal erotica recalled, "We hadn't reckoned on the coppers' numeric acumen.  T'was not long ‘fore we'd nary a tuppence earn with the rise in confiscations." By the mid-1880s, erotic connect-the-dots had been abandoned in favor of less cryptic illustrations.

The story behind their re-appearance and Disnification in the hands of the Americans is a matter of some controversy.  Were twentieth-century American dot-to-dots developed independently of their British forerunners?  Who is responsible for this renaissance?  Is it still possible to masturbate to a series of numbered lines?

Below I have included several charming examples of Victorian-era connect-the-dots, circa 1880.  Although the artist remains anonymous, his graceful, well-proportioned nudes have been favorably compared to Benjamin Stout's lithographs, namely his illustrations for The Lustful Turk and les Flagelants Féminins.