A skinny third row down on my first bookcase demands that I stack them horizontally. The books this week are mostly health and some sex-related titles, including a book on stammering, one printed in Norwegian (from our last-summer adventures to BookTown), and a possibly self-published book from 1947, printed in Baltimore and signed by the […]
Category: Petting and Sex
Kissing tips and naughty bits.
Book Inventory: Shelf 1, Row 2, in which I discover I file badly
I’m only on shelf one, row two, and I realize that I have sex books for kids mixed in with physical education textbooks, and other health books. Woops. I guess I should reorganize as I go, but eh, that’s not within scope of the project. 🙂 I also (re)discovered that I have a book from 1782 in […]
Antique Vibrator Collection
Miss Abigail has a little thing, I guess you could say, about antique vibrators. Don’t get any wild ideas ~ it’s nothing dirty (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) ~ I just love the packaging on those old boxes, trying so carefully to talk about the health benefits of use and the calming effect their […]
Apparently I’ve Been Channeling My Grandmother All These Years
A few months ago, my mother uncovered a college paper that my Grandmother Bailey (her mother) had written when she was at Oberlin College. She saw that the topic was right up my alley, so sent it along to me. The paper is titled “Building Healthy Sex Knowledge” and was written for a child development […]
Personal Hygiene for Young Women and Men (1920s)
For my day job, I work at the Library of Congress helping archive the Internet, and I don’t often get to see the physical stuff in our collections. So when a colleague tipped me off to some amazing films from the 1920s that had apparently been in our nitrate vault and scored by another colleague, […]
The Frighteningly Illustrated Encyclopedia of Sex (1950/1977)
I meant to post this earlier this week, but in the D.C. region we’ve been overcome in the last few days by earthquakes and impending hurricanes, so it’s been a bit hectic. As I reported over on my Facebook page, a few stacks of paperbacks fell off the tops of my bookshelves during the earthquake […]
Shopping for Books the Old Fashioned Way
“Sixth Thousand Now Ready!” “An Important Book for the Family and School!” “An Attractive and Useful Gift” read the ad, found in the back of the 1894 printing of The Physician’s Wife, which I recently I picked up in Baltimore. How could I not be intrigued? Ads often appear in the back of some of my […]
How to Win a Woman, part II (1923)
Recently, I featured some advice from the lovely and talented Elinor Glyn on how to win a woman. Excerpted from her 1923 book The Philosophy of Love, Glyn tells the story of Richard, who is trying to woo his love, Sallie. We left off wondering if any of Glyn’s tips might have paid off for […]
Invitation Card
Now here’s a fun card. Perhaps it counts as a new spin on the classic “why don’t you come up and see my etchings?” Wikipedia tells me that familiar phrase has been around since 1891.
Professor Huggum
Yet another card in this month’s Fun Card series: “Wholesale dealer in Love, Hugs, Squeezes and Kisses… samples free on request!” Hee! This one speaks for itself.