N.p.: N.p., N.d. [c. 1950s]

Four 8vo exercise books, pp. 133, 76, 109 and 61, three in boards, the other in stiff paper wrappers. One or two bindings a little shaken, some preliminaries spotted, but contents bright and in near fine condition.

A collection of typed erotica, bound in boards and wrappers, dating from the 1950s. Four pornographic novellas, one in each book.

Two of the novellas present here are My Grandmother's Tale and La Rose D'Amour, both originally published in the underground publication The Pearl, the infamous pornographic periodical of the late nineteenth century. Of the other two, Tommy Comes Of Age may be American, containing as it does pornographic rewrites of Henry Longfellow. His poem The Slave's Dream(1842), the first stanza of which reads 'Beside the ungathered rice he lay, |His sickle in his hand; |His breast was bare, his matted hair |Was buried in the sand.', is here rewritten as 'Besides the ungathered hay she lay, |Her knickers in her hand. |Her legs were bare and she showed the hair |Where her cunt lay sweet and grand.' The other, The Two Sisters...or Four Years Of Licentiousness, has a (typed) title page which tell us the work has been translated from the French. A publication date is also given: '1950....London'.

In the 1950s, London's Soho was the country's main provider of pornography, both visual and literary, and typed pornographic novels were often sold under the counter there. They had several advantages for both seller and buyer: they ensured that business could continue even when printed material was scarce; they were more difficult to identify, either by police or spouses; and they were more difficult to prosecute, not having a publisher.

A mixture of judicial zeal and family embarrassment has had a strong adverse effect on the survival rate of books like these. Now very scarce, these are four exceptional, and exceptionally scarce, examples.

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