Abel and I are members of a private library: a venerable establishment over 100 years old, with an archive of books on social sciences and arts. There are wooden desks with lamps and chairs, rows and rows of bookcases, and a winding metal staircase to a gallery up top.

That’s where the education section is, in the opposite corner from the staircase. When I go up there, the steps clang under the soles of my shoes, and then, no matter how daintily I walk, my every step on the old creaky boards announces to the readers downstairs: “Here’s another pervert going to the education section!” (Or, to the readers who go there as often as I do: “Here’s that pervert going to the education section again.”)

Obviously, not every book has anything interesting to say about corporal punishment; some are just really dull memoirs of dull educators with dust in their wigs. And yet… there is plenty for us to sink our spanko teeth in.

This looked like a good source of posts for the new year. In the future I’m going to post the juicy extracts from this glorious archive. You’ll like it, I promise.

P.S. And we haven’t even really started on the prison records yet. Or naval history. Or the Romans. Some of those books are less embarrassingly located, I hope.