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RARE & SECONDHAND GAY RARE & SECONDHAND
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Sexuality
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Content: "In this fascinating and controversial book the author traces the history of pornography and of society's reactions to it from the date of the first-known love song composed in Sumeria over 4,000 years ago to the present day. "Taking us by way of such authors and books as Aristophanes's Lysistrata, The Bible, Ovid's The Act of Love, Petronius, Apuleius, The Exeter Book - the first recorded pornography in English - Boccacio and Chaucer, the great Elizabethans, through the classical, medieval and renaissance worlds, Mr Loth shows how at no time before the seventeenth century did the authorities anywhere - least of all the Catholic Church - attempt to ban pornography as such. "Then cam what in Mr Loth's view was the fateful year of 1642 when the English Puritans not only closed the theatres but banned the publication of all 'light literature'. It was at this moment that 'The serpent of shame entered the garden of sex'. The reaction after the Restoration brought, with Dryden, Congreve and Rochester, the obscene joke and allusion back into fullest favour. But it was pornography with a difference, pornography too often with a leer. "And so it was to continue. Through the first successful prosecution for obscenity took place in 1728, public opinion was on the whole still tolerant of the pornographic, making of Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure one of the best sellers of all time. But in the nineteenth century all this was changed. This was the age of Dr Bowdler, of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and of parallel attitudes in America. But, as Mr Loth convincingly shows, it was also an age which saw a greater output of pornographic literature - mostly of a worthless nature - than had ever been known before. Only now it had to be published and bought clandestinely. "It is indeed the them of this book that pornography free and unfettered is a natural adjunct of human nature. It is neither possible nor desirable to try to suppress it. The only result is to debase its nature and to allow unscrupulous men and women to make fortunes out of it. Mr Loth ends his book with a plea for the abandonment of all forms of censorship of literature and for allowing public opinion and taste to be the sole arbiters of what should and should not be published." (from the jacket) Background / Biography: Reviews: Arbery Books also sells secondhand and rare mainstream titles. Click here for our full list. |
"Whole libraries have been written about sex in fact and ficiton, poetry and prose, and current literature is endlessly concerned with it - the goals and rules, joys and fears, perils and pleasures, how and when to get it. But for a long time one of the libraries, the pornographic one, has been out of bounds for ordinary readers. It is a bigger collection than it ought to be because we are vastly confused as to the books which belong in it, what constitutes a forbidden obscenity, who should declare it so, from whom it should be kept, and how the prohibition should be enforced. This was always so. Fifty years ago there would have been no question as to the propriety of leaving an unexpurgated Boccaccio on a respectable family's living-room table. Nor two hundred and fifty years ago either. In 1910 the answer would have been a horrified 'no'; in 1710 a bewildered 'why not?' But each age knew where it stood. Today we do not." opening paragraphs 
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