February 1964

This February 1964 limited edition of Beautiful Bondage is a compact, almost entirely photographic publication devoted to the visual documentation of Japanese rope bondage. The cover identifies the work as 美しき緊しめ 第三集, the third collection in the Beautiful Bondage series, while also marking it as Limited Edition No. 1. Rather than following the mixed editorial structure of contemporary SM magazines, the publication dispenses with essays, fiction, correspondence, and conventional front matter and presents bondage photography as its principal and effectively exclusive subject. The opening cover establishes the format with a woman bound outdoors against a wooded background. The interior then becomes a sustained catalog of bondage poses photographed in domestic rooms, tatami interiors, studios, and occasional outdoor settings. Most pages arrange three or four separate photographs, each accompanied by a narrow vertical caption. These captions frequently identify the configuration of the rope, the position of the arms or wrists, the use of gags, the direction of binding, or the particular visual effect produced by the restraint. Recurrent forms include arms bound behind the back, chest and torso harnesses, wrist and ankle restraints, overhead suspension or stretching of the arms, pillar and architectural ties, crotch ropes, neck ropes, tightly wrapped upper-body bindings, and combinations of rope with cloth or patterned gags. The publication repeatedly shifts between comparatively simple restraint and more elaborate configurations. Some photographs emphasize the geometry of the rope across the torso, while others foreground compression, rope marks, posture, facial expression, or the contrast between exposed skin and cord. Several sequences show the same women in related poses, allowing variations in angle, dress, gagging, and rope placement to function almost as a visual taxonomy. Clothing ranges from ordinary dresses and sailor-style garments to underwear, partial nudity, and full nudity, giving the volume the character of both an erotic portfolio and a practical visual repertoire of bondage arrangements. The final page returns to a single large bondage photograph and supplies publication information in Japanese and English. It identifies Tenseisha in Abeno, Osaka as the publisher, labels the publication No. 1, prices the limited edition at 1,000 yen, and states that it is not sold through bookstores. This restricted-distribution framing is historically significant: Beautiful Bondage presents rope bondage not as a secondary illustration within a broader erotic magazine but as a specialized collectible photographic genre intended for a dedicated readership.

This issue has no formal printed table of contents.

The cover gives the Japanese series title as 美しき緊しめ 第三集 and identifies this particular publication as 限定版第一号, Limited Edition No. 1. It was printed on January 30, 1964 and issued on February 1, 1964. The publication consists almost wholly of photographic plates with brief vertical captions; these captions are descriptive labels attached to individual photographs and do not constitute a table of contents. Numerous captions also contain names in parentheses, apparently identifying models or contributors, but several are too small or ambiguous to normalize confidently without dedicated transcription. The final colophon identifies the publisher in English as Tenseisya and in Japanese as 天星社, located in Abeno, Osaka. No substantive prose articles, fiction, correspondence sections, or editorial essays are present.