In cosmopolitan cities like London and New York, the sex theme is predominant in certain types of rather furtive bookstores. They deal largely with paperbacks, stressing sexual relationships, erotic magazines, and treatises, both authoritatively written and, in some cases, barely literate, on erotic mores and variations of perversions. The paperbacks, flaunting jackets that play a significant role in the attraction of the text, range from lust to rape, from masochism to tribadism, with all possible intermediate permutations. Such fictional productions not infrequently transcend the ingenuities of the Marquis de Sade.
Contemporary witches, sorceresses, and spell-binders of varying degrees of reliability still use, as love potions, old, traditional ingredients. One of these is hippomanes. Hippomanes was well known among the ancients. It is a fleshy excrescence that appears on a foal’s head at birth. When dried, and swallowed by the person in search of the amatory excitation, it produces, according to these dark practitioners, a result that cannot be questioned.
The erotic merit of this equine aposteme is confirmed by a number of authorities, from Vergil himself, the Roman epic poet, to Pausanias, the second century A.D. Greek geographer, and to the sixteenth century Neapolitan alchemist and occultist Gambattista della Porta.
Benoit, H. The Many Faces of Love. New York: Pantheon, c. 1955.
Bibliotheca Erotica Moniacensis. A German collection of erotica.
Bibliotheca Roloffiana. A collection of erotica published in Germany in the eighteenth century.
Blondeau, Nicolas. Dictionnaire Erotique. Paris: Isidore Liseux, 1885.
Clauder, Johannes. De Philtris. Leipzig, 1661.
Decle, L. Three Years in Savage Africa. London: Methuen, 1898.
Dufour, H. Histoire de la Prostitution chez tous les Peuples du Monde. Bruxelles: 1857.
Dulaure, Jacques-Antoine. The Gods of Generation. English translation by A.F.N. Privately printed. New York: Panurge Press, 1934.
Ellis, Havelock. Studies in the Psychology of Sex. 2 volumes. New York: Random House, c. 1938–1942.
Epton, N. C. Love and the French. London: Cassell, 1959.
Epton, N. C. Love and the English. London: Cassell, 1960.
Epton, N. C. Love and the Spanish. London: Cassell, 1961.