UPDATE JANUARY 2024: This educational book is no longer in production. This sex toy review remains as a reference for those who are curious. While you’re here, why not check out some additional educational info – like online submissive tasks, beginner pegging positions, saran wrap bondage, and enema 101 info.
“Bondage for Beginners” is a beginner-intended book all about bondage. The book is hardcover and surprisingly, includes all-color pages on the inside. There are 4 chapters within the 127 pages. The book is written by Lisa Sweet and has a tagline of “Tie-Me-Up Tricks and Knots”. The book is pretty small in physical size and is one of those “mini-books” that is about the size of my outstretched hand in size. The book is published by Carlton Books. The front of the book shows a cartoon-like “bondage” woman with a whip while the back shows praise for the book. The entire front-side ends up making it look pretty beginner-ish and really nice and friendly which was a nice difference from the “serious” looking books that most bondage books are.
The neat thing about this book is how fast of a read it is. I’d say that I easily read through the entire book in about an hour. It makes it extremely easy for a couple to pick up this book, read it that night, then reference the book throughout their play sessions that night (and other nights) to make their sex lives a bit more exciting. It’s not a hard book at all to read, and it isn’t meant to be. It’s easy to read through, easy to get the information, and fun to re-read and reference.
The colors of the book help a lot with the ease of reading. Each one of the pages is a different, vibrant color. There isn’t any black/white basic color schemes with this one. The colors don’t hurt your eyes, but they do end up making it much more exciting to turn the page. The text is large enough (and black), so it ends up being really easy to read as well. The pages are nice, high-quality photo-like pages, so they handle being turned well.
Along with the pretty colored pages, there are a lot of pictures. While none of the pictures are of actual humans, the pictures are all of iPod commercial-esque shadow women/men. It shows pictures of them in bondage or just sitting around. There’s a gorgeous picture of one of these shadow-esque women hanging around in a corset as well. The pictures are never explicit or anything since they are just shadow figures. For the most part, almost all of the shadow figures shown are of people with breasts.
However, something to understand is that this book was never meant to be a “all-inclusive” book about bondage. It is meant to be a quick read that gives you the basics and what you need to start playing. You won’t find amazingly detailed instructions in this book, but if you are new to bondage, you will find quite a few different tips, tricks, and bondage ties to satisfy your curiosity and let you know if you want to pursue more expensive options about bondage.
The vast majority of this book is set up with a how-to on bondage ties. It spends quite a bit of time talking about these bondage ties – if I’m being specific there are 36 pages purely devoted to just giving a how-to to do various bondage knots and various bondage ties. The ties are well-explained, but honestly, my biggest complaint was the fact that there weren’t really any pictures to go along with things. People tend to learn better with pictures, but none of the knots nor the bondage ties had any sort of pictures – usually, no pictures of the finished product either to let you know what you were getting yourself into. This could make these ties difficult to follow – especially for beginners. Even though the ties are well-explained, pictures always display things better than words would.
However, this book does have a neat little feature that I’ve never seen a bondage book have before: The Bondage Cheat Sheet. It’s basically a list of “If he/she wants _____, do this tie.” It includes things like “If she wants bigger breasts”, “When you want a crotch rope but only have one rope”, “When you Want to Get them Sexy Underwear But Don’t Want to Spend A Lot of Money” and quite a few different options. For some, it just references a previous tie taught to you. However, for most, it introduces a new tie in the text for you to attempt or recommends you layer a couple of different ties.
Another neat feature of this book is the “scene” feature. There are step-by-step instructions on how to do a good bondage scene for a beginner, intermediate, and advanced player. Along with that, it also gives “A great scene in…” which is basically a guide that gives you a good scene to do in different time increments, so if you have 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc. The scenes are pretty fun and pretty unique – especially when it comes to some of the scenes for the shorter time limits.
What else does the book provide? A lot of basic information about other forms of non-rope bondage, information about impact play, safety information, ways to choose your ropes, a bondage directory, and quite a bit of other random information. Like I stated before, it doesn’t go into detail about many of the topics aside from rope bondage, but it does give a lot of basic information on a lot of different, basic bondage topics. The book, even though it’s meant to be general bondage, does mostly focus on rope bondage for beginners instead of general bondage.
Regardless of the focus on rope bondage, I think it’s a fun, general look at bondage. While other books can be serious, this book makes bondage look a lot more fun and romantic than others. The colors along with the shadow pictures make this book a clear choice for those who are purely curious or want to introduce their partner lightly to the idea of bondage.
