Mills and Boon bodice rippers get naughty with new porn titles

Mills and Boon, publisher of best-selling, bodice-ripping romances, is to publish its first pornographic book.

Its racy new range of Spice titles, already on sale in America, will feature 'sex for enjoyment' and even include bondage and threesomes.

Gerald Mills and Charles Boon founded their sports and crafts publishers in 1908 and the house managed to last until the 1960s before the first sex scenes between married couples were described on its pages.

Now, 100 years later, one Spice heroine, archaeologist Breezy Malone, becomes a leather-corseted FBI agent to seduce a terrorist in the erotic thriller Spies, Lies and Naked Thighs.

Claire Somerville, the publisher's marketing director, said: 'It doesn't have to be linked to an emotional connection between heroes and heroines.'

She added: 'In the Fifties and Sixties, some of the writers wanted to depict society in a more realistic way.

'One writer (Jan Tempest) was told to edit out an illegitimate character. Divorce and illegitimacy were unacceptable for the Irish market, which is very big for us.'

But it was 1973 before Mills and Boon, which has 35 million titles, referred to masturbation and then only as a 'solitary, inadequate substitute' for sex.

In 2001 Mills and Boon launched its Blaze imprint, featuring whipped cream, handcuffs and inter-racial lesbianism.

Ms Somerville called the books 'an emotional barometer for Britain in the 20th century'. She added: 'You can chart the development of social and sexual mores.'

The explicit Spice titles will go on sale next year published by Harlequin, which bought Mills and Boon in 1971.