Same-sex tale is top titillating read in British Library archive

A TALE of same-sex pleasure is the most-read racy title at the British Library, it has emerged, as favourites from the institution’s cache of erotic books are revealed.

The institution’s Private Case collection includes 2,560 volumes spanning Oscar Wilde, pornography, and catalogues of 18th-century prostitutes.

Curators kept it under tight restrictions from the 1850s on grounds of obscenity, with special permission required to read them.

Now a Victorian work of homosexual pornographic literature has been revealed as the most popular title since the collection was deregulated in 1998.

The 1881 erotic work The Sins of the Cities of the Plain has been requested 191 times, while a 4,000-page account of sexual conquests, a fictional French “whore dialogue” between nuns, and a “man of pleasure’s calendar” listing Georgian sex workers have had scores of requests to read them.

The British Library said after the archive was made digital the books “brought a wider range of researchers into the British Library’s reading rooms to examine the original volumes”.

It added the collection has proved popular because it “represents a unique resource for a wide range of historians and other researchers of gender and sexuality”.

The second most popular item with 102 requests was Venus in the Cloisters, made-up dialogue between nuns.

My Secret Life, a million-word account of sexual experiences in Victorian Britain, received 101 requests.

Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, a register of prostitutes in the London area, was requested 85 times and the fictional pornography Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure on 38 occasions.

A library spokesman said: “The Private Case collection is a hugely rich resource covering many aspects of human sexuality over more than three centuries, including material that was rare, marginal, censored and taboo.”