Times Online
The British Museum and British Library have some of the biggest collections of smut in the world including S&M magazines
Fanny Hill illustration by Charles Mozley
As the heavy doors of Cupboard 205 swing open in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, I can’t believe my luck. This is my exclusive peek inside a piece of antique furniture that, for many decades, has been privately known to the department’s staff as “the Porn Cupboard”. This is where stacks of racy and disturbing pictures, regarded as unfit for public attention, have traditionally been kept out of sight.
The British Museum has a strict duty to preserve objects — even pornographic ones — for posterity.
A historic object isn’t any less historic because it causes offence, and the guardians of our cultural heritage can’t suddenly start behaving like the Taliban. So exactly how much controversial material has the museum collected? What’s on Her Majesty’s top shelf?
Most of the Porn Cupboard’s contents today look respectable: here are printing plates for the reproduction of thoroughly decent works by Turner and Dürer. That’s because, since the latter part of the 20th century, a lot of erotic material has been removed from the cupboard and repositioned in the department. “We’ve been integrating the contents of it into the main collection,” explains Sheila O’Connell, assistant keeper of prints and drawings. For instance, there used to be a Rembrandt etching in the cupboard called The Bed, depicting a couple making love, with the man on top of the woman; but that is now with the other Rembrandts in the museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings, on the fourth floor. You can request it and, as long as nobody else is busy looking at it, they will show it to you. There used to be sheaves of banned Georgian cartoons by Thomas Rowlandson in Cupboard 205, but now, providing you have come of age, you can go to Prints and Drawings and study Rowlandson’s images of gentlemen and saucy wenches having explicit intercourse on beds, on road journeys, and beside gravestones.
“There are still some things left in Cupboard 205, but only because they don’t have an obvious place to go,” says O’Connell, who begins to unwrap the treasures. The erotica is now confined, appropriately, to the top shelves. It’s a real mixed bag. On the topmost shelf is a box file marked L’Histoire Universelle, which turns out to contain 74 explicit antique illustrations of mythological and historical characters frolicking and having sex. This is one of thousands of items that were bequeathed to the museum by a wealthy British porn-collector called Henry Spencer Ashbee when he died in 1900. Ashbee, who was in textiles and travelled widely, may have picked up L’Histoire somewhere on the Continent.
Another box, one shelf down, opens to reveal colourful pictures of a topless buxom brunette canoodling with a variety of men. Largely unseen and unknown, these are original drawings by Charles Mozley — a Sheffield-born artist also known for his theatre and film posters — for an unpublished 1968 edition of the rude 18th-century novel Fanny Hill.
The contents of a third file marked “Remaining erotica awaiting redistribution” include erotic playing cards from the jazz age, and a folder labelled “Studies of Parts”, containing a pile of penis drawings. Attached to this is a note from the famous typographer and sex maniac Eric Gill, suggesting that his “dear brother Cecil Ernest Gaspar” give the pictures to the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, because “anatomy books are not well illustrated in respect of the male organ”.
Cupboard 205 in Prints and Drawings is not the only hiding place for erotica at the British Museum: other departments have had their own stashes during the institution’s 250-year history. The museum’s book department used to put obscene novels, plays and magazines into what it called the “Private Case”, where they received extra-special protection. And the Department of Antiquities once had a cupboard that was so secret, they actually called it the Secretum. Many artefacts went into the Secretum in the 19th century — such that it seems to have become a world-beating collection of priapic objects. These included wax phalluses from Italian churches, which had been kindly handed over by the envoy Sir William Hamilton, the famous cuckolded husband of Nelson’s Lady Hamilton. The Secretum grew significantly in 1865, with the donation by the antiquarian
Dr George Witt of more than 400 “symbols of the early worship of mankind”, from places as far-flung as Pompeii and the Far East — more phalluses. Phallic antiques like this are still in demand: in April, a set of Roman bronze amulets resembling male genitalia sold for £4,250 — well above the highest estimate of £1,800 — at Christie’s in London. Like the dirty pictures in Cupboard 205, many of the Secretum’s objects have since been reintegrated in the museum, where they hide in plain sight among millions of less controversial treasures.
It seems appropriate that room 69 is one of the most loved-up spaces in the museum. Here you will find a picture of Eros himself, with rather small genitals, on an ancient-Greek amphora. On another one nearby is the teasing image of a Greek beauty seductively removing the belt of her chiton, or tunic, in front of a semi-clad man.
The museum’s Victorian period is marked by a reluctant and embarrassed acceptance of obscene donations. But a century after Victoria’s death, the institution actively sought out an item that would once have provoked extreme protest. In 1999 it paid £1.8m for the Warren Cup, which sounds like an international prize for yachting, but is actually a silver Roman vessel from the
1st century. On both sides, a young male is clearly having fun with an older man in a state of undress. This icon of homoeroticism is named after a former owner, the American collector Ned Warren, who bought it from a dealer in Rome for £2,000 in 1911. The cup is in a case in room 70, right next to the famous Portland Vase — on which a Greek hero called Peleus is seen chatting up the sea goddess Thetis, who is basically a sexy mermaid. (They will go on to father that famous heel, Achilles.)
If you go to room 2, you can see “the oldest known sculpture of a couple making love”. This priceless chunk of glistening calcite, found in the Judaean desert and thought to be at least 11,000 years old, shows a featureless pair locked in “a tender sexual embrace”, which, the caption goes on to explain, “is made more explicit and ingenious because the sculpture is also masculine in all its aspects”. In other words, the couple’s heads might remind you of a pair of testicles, and in profile the object looks like — guess what — a phallus.
The Private Case of the museum’s library — the mucky-book stash — may have truly begun its life as a small case, but by 1890 the collection had expanded to occupy 12 small cupboards. And it received a huge boost in 1900, when the late Henry Spencer Ashbee bequeathed about 1,400 erotic books to the museum. The book department was eventually hived off from the museum, opening as the British Library in a spanking new building in King’s Cross in 1997, and the Private Case went with it. The collection of rude volumes now resides in one of the library’s deep and cavernous basements. It remains an object of controversy today: my request to travel into the bowels of the building to see the Private Case in situ was turned down flat, with no reason given.
The filthy publications that went into the Private Case, from the 19th century onwards, weren’t anything like the top-shelf photographic glossies we know today. Many were small, outwardly respectable hardbacks with explicit erotic text in a variety of languages. Material like this was readily available in the shops of Holywell Street in London — a seedy Covent Garden thoroughfare demolished more than a century ago. As early as 1668, we find evidence of a famous man being moved by lewd literature. On February 9 of that year, Samuel Pepys confessed in his diary that he was reading L’Escholle des Filles (The Girls’ School), “which is a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world”. Pepys spent much of that day socialising, singing and knocking back wine, but he picked up the book again before retiring, and was embarrassed enough to destroy it afterwards:
“I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame…”
“Read and destroy” seems to have been common behaviour, with the result that many of these early books have become as rare as Iranian copies of The Satanic Verses. And the British Library doesn’t have every dirty book ever published. For instance, it doesn’t have an original version of the sonnets of Pietro Aretino, from the 1520s, whose illustrations showed a series of 16 sexual positions: a Joy of Sex for the Tudor age. The British Museum has only fragments of the original engravings, minus the “rude bits”, as one curator puts it.
However, the museum does possess a set of 18th-century copies by the French antiquarian and artist Jean-Frédéric Waldeck. Books that found their way into the Private Case were offensive on religious as well as sexual grounds. “Quite a common theme of early pornography is goings-on in monasteries and suchlike, with monks and nuns,” says John Goldfinch, a rare-books curator at the British Library. “A certain amount of literature from France, for example, is about the corruption of the state and the church before the revolution, so you get obscene books featuring priests and nuns.” He produces a fine example: a nicely bound copy of L’Adamite, subtitled Le Jésuite Insensible, dated 1684 and carrying one of Ashbee’s personalised bookplates. Inside, members of the Jesuit order get up to all sorts. En français, naturellement.
That strikes the modern explorer of the Private Case collection is the amount of whipping and birching in it. One privately printed volume from 1870, The Quintessence of Birch Discipline, by Mrs Martinet, has plates showing extremely aroused men lashing out left, right and centre with bunches of twigs. A contemporary volume, Lady Bumtickler’s Revels, purports to be the text of “a comic opera in two acts, as it was performed at Lady Bumtickler’s private theatre in Birch Grove, with unbounded applause”. “Unbridled” might have been funnier, and one wonders exactly what state the audience was in, because the characters — who include Master Lovebirch and Lady Belinda Flaybum — do little but go on at tedious length about the delights of sadomasochism. We are told that “the male sex may taste something exquisitely sweet in a whipping from the hands of a woman”. First editions like this one of Bumtickler are scarce, and a 1920s reprint was recently being flogged by a rare-books website for as much as £35.
The books in the Private Case were originally subject to heavy restrictions: you had to write to the keeper, the head of the department, to see any of them and give your reasons for wanting to. “The books were quite difficult to see,” says Goldfinch. “They had a separate catalogue, and the catalogue wasn’t available to readers. So there were two stages: you’d have to ask if the book was in the collection, and if it was, you’d have to ask to see it.”
But most people were unaware even of the existence of the Private Case until the publication in 1966 of a book called Private Case — Public Scandal, by Peter Fryer. “In the past, the museum didn’t want to answer questions about the Private Case, and wanted to disguise the extent of the collection,” says Goldfinch. Peter Fryer was key to changing all that. He was a writer who was doing some work in the 1960s that required access to Private Case material, but so many barriers were put in his way that he decided to expose what was happening.”
From the 1960s, although controversial novels were still going into the Private Case rather than the main collection — such as William S Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn — other volumes were “de-suppressed”, including medical textbooks that had never intended to titillate. By 1990 the case had been closed, and to this day, erotic material received by the library goes into the main collection. That’s why, should readers desire to view a copy of The Girls of Penthouse from the 1980s, or Razzle Boobarama from the noughties, the magazines will be dispatched from the “general reference collection”. As will the books containing erotic art nouveau by Aubrey Beardsley and other illustrators, which were published in two early-20th-century pornographic journals called The Amethyst and Opals — which Franz Kafka is known to have read, keeping a stash of them in a locked bookcase at his parents’ home.
So, with each passing year, the British Library’s Private Case itself becomes more and more of a museum piece. It is a time capsule that speaks volumes about the concerns of a pre-liberal wage. “It’s a historical curiosity,” says Goldfinch. “It’s used mostly by academics working on gender studies, because the bulk of it is about men’s view of women.” Similar types come to the British Museum’s prints and drawings department to see the erotic Waldecks and the ribald Rowlandsons. “We get mostly academics and students,” says Sheila O’Connell. “And we have a lot of artists coming in, copying things. Researchers too, and ordinary members of the public.”
One restriction still applies to Private Case requests at the library. “If you ask for any of these books,” says Goldfinch, “you will be asked to sit at one of a designated set of desks in the Rare Books and Music room, where there’s a bit of extra security.” Is there a guard or invigilator watching over you?
“There’s somebody supervising the area.”
This is not a case of the public being protected from the books, it seems, but the other way round. “Even when it was very restricted, things disappeared. Of the books that were in the collection in the early 19th century, we can account for nearly all of them. But two or three of them, there’s no sign of now. Now, that may be a cataloguing mistake — they are here but we can’t find them — but it’s also conceivable that they were stolen.” To get a feel, if that’s the right expression, for the contents of the Private Case, I requested four very varied books from the online catalogue and set out for the library. There was a problem at the issue desk in Rare Books and Music. “I can’t seem to find your request,” said a member of staff, tapping away at a computer. “Ah!” he said finally. “There they are. They’re all special material. Okay, you need to sit at a special desk over there, near the music-inquiries desk. Please choose an empty desk and come back and give me the number, and I’ll give you your books.”
“Special material” is the library’s euphemism for smutty books, and each of my choices came with a pink “special material” slip. “Please do not leave any of these books unattended at any time,” the issue-desk man instructed me firmly.
The man and woman whispering to each other behind the music-inquiries desk were evidently the “supervisors” I’d been told about.I opened a thin, anonymous Victorian volume, Intrigues and Confessions of a Ballet Girl, which has a rather tumescent subtitle: “Disclosing Startling and Voluptuous Scenes before & behind the Curtain, Enacted by Well-Known Personages in the Theatrical, Military, Medical & Other Professions; with Kisses at Vauxhall, Greenwich &c, &c. and a Full Disclosure of the Secret and Amatory Doings in the Dressing Rooms, under & upon the Stage, in the Light and in the Dark, by One Who Has Had Her Share”.
It turned out to be 23 pages of Mills & Boonish swooning and fevered embraces. On to Uncle Roy’s Special Niece, a filthy American paperback from 1971, in which a young girl has endless incestuous sex sessions after the death of her mother. “Roy felt a twinge of remorse at the thought of making love with Susan, his sister’s daughter, but there was no denying the attractiveness of her youthful body…”
Oh, so that’s all right, Uncle Roy.
Books like these are rare, having regularly been used as bonfire fodder by ferocious Christian groups. I later found another copy for sale online, priced at $110. My last book was in a big blue box, which opened to reveal something resembling an enormous psychedelic porn annual, with the title Wet Dreams. It was a collection of accounts of two blue-movie festivals in Amsterdam in 1970 and 1971, with lots of pictures of spliff-smoking hippies having sex in every possible position, and chapter headings like “Every Time He Touches You It Makes Me C*m*”. I blushed like a freshly painted pillar box as I turned the 263 pages, reflecting that when this library was founded for “all studious and curious persons” in the 18th century, they surely didn’t have this kind of curiosity in mind.
When Benjamin Franklin said nothing was certain other than death and taxes, he missed out the P-word. Even if every rude website packed up and went home; even if all the top shelves in all the newsagents were cleared for more improving material; even if the spouses of every one of our MPs stopped watching blue movies — even then, the British Museum and British Library would still be there, boasting some of the most extensive collections of pornography in the known world.
:.
The British Museum and British Library have some of the biggest collections of smut in the world including S&M magazines
The Warren Cup, the homoerotic Roman vessel that now sits in room 70
From the British Library's Private Case - a paperback chronicling an uncle's incestuous relationship with his niece
The oldest-known sculpture of a couple making love, according to the museum. This carved chunk of calcite dates back at least 11,000 years. It was found in the Judaean desert
A blow-by-blow account of two spliff-smoking free-love festivals in the 1970s
The British Museum has a strict duty to preserve objects — even pornographic ones — for posterity.
A historic object isn’t any less historic because it causes offence, and the guardians of our cultural heritage can’t suddenly start behaving like the Taliban. So exactly how much controversial material has the museum collected? What’s on Her Majesty’s top shelf?
Most of the Porn Cupboard’s contents today look respectable: here are printing plates for the reproduction of thoroughly decent works by Turner and Dürer. That’s because, since the latter part of the 20th century, a lot of erotic material has been removed from the cupboard and repositioned in the department. “We’ve been integrating the contents of it into the main collection,” explains Sheila O’Connell, assistant keeper of prints and drawings. For instance, there used to be a Rembrandt etching in the cupboard called The Bed, depicting a couple making love, with the man on top of the woman; but that is now with the other Rembrandts in the museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings, on the fourth floor. You can request it and, as long as nobody else is busy looking at it, they will show it to you. There used to be sheaves of banned Georgian cartoons by Thomas Rowlandson in Cupboard 205, but now, providing you have come of age, you can go to Prints and Drawings and study Rowlandson’s images of gentlemen and saucy wenches having explicit intercourse on beds, on road journeys, and beside gravestones.
“There are still some things left in Cupboard 205, but only because they don’t have an obvious place to go,” says O’Connell, who begins to unwrap the treasures. The erotica is now confined, appropriately, to the top shelves. It’s a real mixed bag. On the topmost shelf is a box file marked L’Histoire Universelle, which turns out to contain 74 explicit antique illustrations of mythological and historical characters frolicking and having sex. This is one of thousands of items that were bequeathed to the museum by a wealthy British porn-collector called Henry Spencer Ashbee when he died in 1900. Ashbee, who was in textiles and travelled widely, may have picked up L’Histoire somewhere on the Continent.
Another box, one shelf down, opens to reveal colourful pictures of a topless buxom brunette canoodling with a variety of men. Largely unseen and unknown, these are original drawings by Charles Mozley — a Sheffield-born artist also known for his theatre and film posters — for an unpublished 1968 edition of the rude 18th-century novel Fanny Hill.
The contents of a third file marked “Remaining erotica awaiting redistribution” include erotic playing cards from the jazz age, and a folder labelled “Studies of Parts”, containing a pile of penis drawings. Attached to this is a note from the famous typographer and sex maniac Eric Gill, suggesting that his “dear brother Cecil Ernest Gaspar” give the pictures to the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, because “anatomy books are not well illustrated in respect of the male organ”.
Cupboard 205 in Prints and Drawings is not the only hiding place for erotica at the British Museum: other departments have had their own stashes during the institution’s 250-year history. The museum’s book department used to put obscene novels, plays and magazines into what it called the “Private Case”, where they received extra-special protection. And the Department of Antiquities once had a cupboard that was so secret, they actually called it the Secretum. Many artefacts went into the Secretum in the 19th century — such that it seems to have become a world-beating collection of priapic objects. These included wax phalluses from Italian churches, which had been kindly handed over by the envoy Sir William Hamilton, the famous cuckolded husband of Nelson’s Lady Hamilton. The Secretum grew significantly in 1865, with the donation by the antiquarian
Dr George Witt of more than 400 “symbols of the early worship of mankind”, from places as far-flung as Pompeii and the Far East — more phalluses. Phallic antiques like this are still in demand: in April, a set of Roman bronze amulets resembling male genitalia sold for £4,250 — well above the highest estimate of £1,800 — at Christie’s in London. Like the dirty pictures in Cupboard 205, many of the Secretum’s objects have since been reintegrated in the museum, where they hide in plain sight among millions of less controversial treasures.
It seems appropriate that room 69 is one of the most loved-up spaces in the museum. Here you will find a picture of Eros himself, with rather small genitals, on an ancient-Greek amphora. On another one nearby is the teasing image of a Greek beauty seductively removing the belt of her chiton, or tunic, in front of a semi-clad man.
The museum’s Victorian period is marked by a reluctant and embarrassed acceptance of obscene donations. But a century after Victoria’s death, the institution actively sought out an item that would once have provoked extreme protest. In 1999 it paid £1.8m for the Warren Cup, which sounds like an international prize for yachting, but is actually a silver Roman vessel from the
1st century. On both sides, a young male is clearly having fun with an older man in a state of undress. This icon of homoeroticism is named after a former owner, the American collector Ned Warren, who bought it from a dealer in Rome for £2,000 in 1911. The cup is in a case in room 70, right next to the famous Portland Vase — on which a Greek hero called Peleus is seen chatting up the sea goddess Thetis, who is basically a sexy mermaid. (They will go on to father that famous heel, Achilles.)
If you go to room 2, you can see “the oldest known sculpture of a couple making love”. This priceless chunk of glistening calcite, found in the Judaean desert and thought to be at least 11,000 years old, shows a featureless pair locked in “a tender sexual embrace”, which, the caption goes on to explain, “is made more explicit and ingenious because the sculpture is also masculine in all its aspects”. In other words, the couple’s heads might remind you of a pair of testicles, and in profile the object looks like — guess what — a phallus.
The Private Case of the museum’s library — the mucky-book stash — may have truly begun its life as a small case, but by 1890 the collection had expanded to occupy 12 small cupboards. And it received a huge boost in 1900, when the late Henry Spencer Ashbee bequeathed about 1,400 erotic books to the museum. The book department was eventually hived off from the museum, opening as the British Library in a spanking new building in King’s Cross in 1997, and the Private Case went with it. The collection of rude volumes now resides in one of the library’s deep and cavernous basements. It remains an object of controversy today: my request to travel into the bowels of the building to see the Private Case in situ was turned down flat, with no reason given.
The filthy publications that went into the Private Case, from the 19th century onwards, weren’t anything like the top-shelf photographic glossies we know today. Many were small, outwardly respectable hardbacks with explicit erotic text in a variety of languages. Material like this was readily available in the shops of Holywell Street in London — a seedy Covent Garden thoroughfare demolished more than a century ago. As early as 1668, we find evidence of a famous man being moved by lewd literature. On February 9 of that year, Samuel Pepys confessed in his diary that he was reading L’Escholle des Filles (The Girls’ School), “which is a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world”. Pepys spent much of that day socialising, singing and knocking back wine, but he picked up the book again before retiring, and was embarrassed enough to destroy it afterwards:
“I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame…”
“Read and destroy” seems to have been common behaviour, with the result that many of these early books have become as rare as Iranian copies of The Satanic Verses. And the British Library doesn’t have every dirty book ever published. For instance, it doesn’t have an original version of the sonnets of Pietro Aretino, from the 1520s, whose illustrations showed a series of 16 sexual positions: a Joy of Sex for the Tudor age. The British Museum has only fragments of the original engravings, minus the “rude bits”, as one curator puts it.
However, the museum does possess a set of 18th-century copies by the French antiquarian and artist Jean-Frédéric Waldeck. Books that found their way into the Private Case were offensive on religious as well as sexual grounds. “Quite a common theme of early pornography is goings-on in monasteries and suchlike, with monks and nuns,” says John Goldfinch, a rare-books curator at the British Library. “A certain amount of literature from France, for example, is about the corruption of the state and the church before the revolution, so you get obscene books featuring priests and nuns.” He produces a fine example: a nicely bound copy of L’Adamite, subtitled Le Jésuite Insensible, dated 1684 and carrying one of Ashbee’s personalised bookplates. Inside, members of the Jesuit order get up to all sorts. En français, naturellement.
That strikes the modern explorer of the Private Case collection is the amount of whipping and birching in it. One privately printed volume from 1870, The Quintessence of Birch Discipline, by Mrs Martinet, has plates showing extremely aroused men lashing out left, right and centre with bunches of twigs. A contemporary volume, Lady Bumtickler’s Revels, purports to be the text of “a comic opera in two acts, as it was performed at Lady Bumtickler’s private theatre in Birch Grove, with unbounded applause”. “Unbridled” might have been funnier, and one wonders exactly what state the audience was in, because the characters — who include Master Lovebirch and Lady Belinda Flaybum — do little but go on at tedious length about the delights of sadomasochism. We are told that “the male sex may taste something exquisitely sweet in a whipping from the hands of a woman”. First editions like this one of Bumtickler are scarce, and a 1920s reprint was recently being flogged by a rare-books website for as much as £35.
The books in the Private Case were originally subject to heavy restrictions: you had to write to the keeper, the head of the department, to see any of them and give your reasons for wanting to. “The books were quite difficult to see,” says Goldfinch. “They had a separate catalogue, and the catalogue wasn’t available to readers. So there were two stages: you’d have to ask if the book was in the collection, and if it was, you’d have to ask to see it.”
But most people were unaware even of the existence of the Private Case until the publication in 1966 of a book called Private Case — Public Scandal, by Peter Fryer. “In the past, the museum didn’t want to answer questions about the Private Case, and wanted to disguise the extent of the collection,” says Goldfinch. Peter Fryer was key to changing all that. He was a writer who was doing some work in the 1960s that required access to Private Case material, but so many barriers were put in his way that he decided to expose what was happening.”
From the 1960s, although controversial novels were still going into the Private Case rather than the main collection — such as William S Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn — other volumes were “de-suppressed”, including medical textbooks that had never intended to titillate. By 1990 the case had been closed, and to this day, erotic material received by the library goes into the main collection. That’s why, should readers desire to view a copy of The Girls of Penthouse from the 1980s, or Razzle Boobarama from the noughties, the magazines will be dispatched from the “general reference collection”. As will the books containing erotic art nouveau by Aubrey Beardsley and other illustrators, which were published in two early-20th-century pornographic journals called The Amethyst and Opals — which Franz Kafka is known to have read, keeping a stash of them in a locked bookcase at his parents’ home.
So, with each passing year, the British Library’s Private Case itself becomes more and more of a museum piece. It is a time capsule that speaks volumes about the concerns of a pre-liberal wage. “It’s a historical curiosity,” says Goldfinch. “It’s used mostly by academics working on gender studies, because the bulk of it is about men’s view of women.” Similar types come to the British Museum’s prints and drawings department to see the erotic Waldecks and the ribald Rowlandsons. “We get mostly academics and students,” says Sheila O’Connell. “And we have a lot of artists coming in, copying things. Researchers too, and ordinary members of the public.”
One restriction still applies to Private Case requests at the library. “If you ask for any of these books,” says Goldfinch, “you will be asked to sit at one of a designated set of desks in the Rare Books and Music room, where there’s a bit of extra security.” Is there a guard or invigilator watching over you?
“There’s somebody supervising the area.”
This is not a case of the public being protected from the books, it seems, but the other way round. “Even when it was very restricted, things disappeared. Of the books that were in the collection in the early 19th century, we can account for nearly all of them. But two or three of them, there’s no sign of now. Now, that may be a cataloguing mistake — they are here but we can’t find them — but it’s also conceivable that they were stolen.” To get a feel, if that’s the right expression, for the contents of the Private Case, I requested four very varied books from the online catalogue and set out for the library. There was a problem at the issue desk in Rare Books and Music. “I can’t seem to find your request,” said a member of staff, tapping away at a computer. “Ah!” he said finally. “There they are. They’re all special material. Okay, you need to sit at a special desk over there, near the music-inquiries desk. Please choose an empty desk and come back and give me the number, and I’ll give you your books.”
“Special material” is the library’s euphemism for smutty books, and each of my choices came with a pink “special material” slip. “Please do not leave any of these books unattended at any time,” the issue-desk man instructed me firmly.
The man and woman whispering to each other behind the music-inquiries desk were evidently the “supervisors” I’d been told about.I opened a thin, anonymous Victorian volume, Intrigues and Confessions of a Ballet Girl, which has a rather tumescent subtitle: “Disclosing Startling and Voluptuous Scenes before & behind the Curtain, Enacted by Well-Known Personages in the Theatrical, Military, Medical & Other Professions; with Kisses at Vauxhall, Greenwich &c, &c. and a Full Disclosure of the Secret and Amatory Doings in the Dressing Rooms, under & upon the Stage, in the Light and in the Dark, by One Who Has Had Her Share”.
It turned out to be 23 pages of Mills & Boonish swooning and fevered embraces. On to Uncle Roy’s Special Niece, a filthy American paperback from 1971, in which a young girl has endless incestuous sex sessions after the death of her mother. “Roy felt a twinge of remorse at the thought of making love with Susan, his sister’s daughter, but there was no denying the attractiveness of her youthful body…”
Oh, so that’s all right, Uncle Roy.
Books like these are rare, having regularly been used as bonfire fodder by ferocious Christian groups. I later found another copy for sale online, priced at $110. My last book was in a big blue box, which opened to reveal something resembling an enormous psychedelic porn annual, with the title Wet Dreams. It was a collection of accounts of two blue-movie festivals in Amsterdam in 1970 and 1971, with lots of pictures of spliff-smoking hippies having sex in every possible position, and chapter headings like “Every Time He Touches You It Makes Me C*m*”. I blushed like a freshly painted pillar box as I turned the 263 pages, reflecting that when this library was founded for “all studious and curious persons” in the 18th century, they surely didn’t have this kind of curiosity in mind.
When Benjamin Franklin said nothing was certain other than death and taxes, he missed out the P-word. Even if every rude website packed up and went home; even if all the top shelves in all the newsagents were cleared for more improving material; even if the spouses of every one of our MPs stopped watching blue movies — even then, the British Museum and British Library would still be there, boasting some of the most extensive collections of pornography in the known world.
:.
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