Review: Erotic Book Plates October 8, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern , trackback
Erotic Book Plates, (ed) Drs Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen (New York 1970)
A rather eccentric and intriguing book from what we will one day look back upon as the mid-twentieth-century sex revolution. Two radical Freudians, who would write half a dozen works on western sex habits, including an old favourite of this blog Walter, were able to gather together 109 erotic book plates from the private collections of Europe and publish them in a single volume.
Beach has avoided here the cover and all but two of the erotic book plates, because anything but the images reproduced would get him blacklisted by Google: no joke Beach once got a stern email from the world’s most popular search engine because he included a picture of a naked runner with a historical post, sigh. Beach chooses to consider the image above as two sweethearts kissing each other goodnight after a gentle walk in the rain; and the one below as costumed dancers in an energetic tussle.
The Kronhausens wanted sex to go mainstream, to be discussed and to be enjoyed. In this they may have been right or wrong, but they usefully pointed out that these book plates were often of a higher quality than the low grade pornography that the labels were, well, labelling. The draftsmanship of the book plates is of an extremely high standard. Some of the images are often rather disturbing, but then why else would book collectors go to the trouble of printing a special set of erotic book plates to be used, side by side, with their normal book plates?
Dominant motifs include Adam and Eve, Chastity Belts and, by far the most popular, Leda and the Swan (‘Did she put on his knowledge with his power/ Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?’). The Kronhausens, who have now gone beyond sex and spend their time on the wilder shores of Buddhism, were delightfully innocent on some points in their introduction.
We were… struck by the relatively large percentage [or erotic plates] from Germany and Austria. Perhaps this is merely a peculiarity of our own collection. But it could be that erotic bookplates were particularly popular in those two countries.
A successor volume was published: Colin R. Lattimore, Erotic bookplates: an introduction (Cambridge 1990), but it is difficult to get hold of. Perhaps one day Beach will open those hallowed pages…
