About Us

I'm Cian, and I sell vintage gay magazines.

It started in a closing-down shop in London in my late twenties. There was a box of old magazines nobody had bothered to price up, and in it was a copy of Vulcan. I'd never heard of it. I bought it for almost nothing and then spent a fortnight working out what I'd actually got hold of, which turned out to be a piece of British gay publishing from a period when having it on your shelf could cost you your job.

I've been collecting and dealing ever since.

These days the shop covers UK titles like Vulcan, Him, Zipper and Gay Times, American ones like Drummer, Honcho and Inches, and a growing range of German publications including Du & Ich, Kerle, BEAR and Dreamboys. Germany had one of the richest gay publishing scenes anywhere and almost none of it reached Britain, so those are the ones I hunt hardest. Stock comes from private sellers, house clearances, auction houses, and a supplier in Germany I've been buying from for a while.

Nearly everything I list is one of one. When it sells, it's gone.

That's why I'd rather describe something properly than shift it quickly. Every item is graded, scanned on a flatbed so you can see exactly what you're buying, and stored at around 50% relative humidity in acid-free sleeves. Anything that arrives smelling of forty years of cigarettes goes into a sealed box with activated charcoal and bicarbonate of soda until it doesn't. Some of it has been in there three months and counting. You can read exactly how I grade and store everything if you want the detail.

Orders go out in plain packaging with nothing on the outside, and payments show on your statement as Cian's Bookshop rather than anything more descriptive. That shouldn't need saying, but it does, so there it is.

Anything that turns up genuinely pristine and matters historically doesn't get sold at all. It goes to the Bishopsgate Institute in London, whose LGBTQ+ archive will still have it long after I'm not around to look after it.

This isn't a get-rich scheme. If it washes its own face I'm happy. Most of this material was hidden, binned or burned, and what survived did so mostly by luck. Someone should be looking after the rest of it, and I'd rather it was with people who actually want it than in a skip.

Have a look at what's in stock, or if you've got something to sell, here's how that works.