“The Marquis de Sade, vilified by respectable society from his own time through ours, apotheosized by Apollinaire as ‘the freest spirit that has yet existed,’ wrote The 120 Days of Sodom while imprisoned in the Bastille. An exhaustive catalog of sexual aberrations and the first systematic exploration—a hundred years before Krafft-Ebing and Freud—of the psychopathology of sex, it is considered Sade’s crowning achievement and the cornerstone of his thought. Lost after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, it was later retrieved but remained unpublished until 1935. In addition to The 120 Days, this volume includes Sade’s ‘Reflections on the Novel,’ his play Oxtiern, and his novella Ernestine. The selections are introduced by Simone de Beauvoir’s landmark essay ‘Must We Burn Sade?’ and Pierre Klossowski’s provocative ‘Nature as Destructive Principal.’”

Publisher: Grove
Paperback: 800 pages

Cock’s-eye-view of the working boys of London in photos taken between 1918 and the 1950s. The pictures are compelling—and so are the boys, even fully clothed! Street hustlers with hardons. Butch buddies modeling kilts, army uniforms and wet shorts. Boys in bed, boys shaving, boys hitching up their pants. And then there’s curly-haired Ralph… the blue-collar, blond Adonis. The roving, randy “middle-class toff with a camera” who snapped all the shots was architect/ex-army officer Montague Glover. These rare glimpses into the gay past “document the three obsessions of his life: the search for ‘rough trade’ on the streets of London; men in uniform; and the handsome East End lover with whom he shared his life for over 50 years—surmounting all obstacles of prejudice, class difference and separation.” Also includes Monty and Ralph’s torrid love letters. The result is “a remarkable story; not only of the private life of one gay man, but of the whole hidden history of what gay men really looked like, felt and dreamed of in the first 50 years of this century.” GR

Publisher: Serpent's Tail
Paperback: 144 pages
Illustrated

A mammoth guide to the human body for medical professionals illustrated by one of the 20th century’s greatest unsung artists, Frank H. Netter, M.D. In his career as a medical illustrator, Netter produced over 4,000 illustrations for the CIBA-GEIGY pharmaceutical company’s medical education program, yet it was not until 1989 that he completed the project of an atlas of purely gross anatomy as opposed to specific surgical techniques, disease pathologies and so on. With over 500 color plates, each with multiple cutaway views of each anatomical region, this is an astounding body of work at the end of a highly prolific career. And as befits an artistic giant, Netter is not bashful about it: “At one point Mr. Flagler, the publisher, and I thought it might be nice to include a foreword by a truly outstanding and renowned anatomist, but there are so many in that category, a considerable number of whom have collaborated with me in the past and who are listed elsewhere in this volume, that we could not make a choice. We did think of men like Vesalius, Leonardo da Vinci, William Hunter and Henry Gray, who of course are unfortunately unavailable, but I do wonder what their comments might have been about this atlas. SS

Publisher: Mosby-Wolfe
Paperback: 351 pages
Illustrated

“Centering around a stolen Inquisition-era torture device, this ominous and dreamlike narrative explores SM, censorship, art and freedom. Featuring music by Psychic TV, Monte Cazzazza, Lustmord and Allegory Chapel.” 45 minutes.

Publisher: M+M
Video

“This book presents the most substantial selection of images yet published from the renowned Burns Archive. Over 100 masterpieces of early medical photography are reproduced along with descriptive texts by Dr. Stanley Burns detailing the medical, sociological and historical significance of the photographs. The rise of modern medicine parallels the rise of photography as a documentary tool, and in this broad-based overview of the Archive we sense the experimental state of both during the 19th century. Included are images which celebrate the physician’s essential position in society, and those which reveal his near helplessness in the face of many diseases. The chronological presentation of the photographs heightens our awareness of just how profound are the changes brought about by advances in medicine, and by the introduction of such tools as the camera. As a document of the human condition A Morning’s Work shows the pain, suffering, joy and fear of its subjects as they confront the camera, and, we presume, their diagnoses. The hope and horror contained in these images mirror contemporary medicine’s “miracles” and failures, and reflect the unchanging nature of the human experience.”

Publisher: Twin Palms
Hardback: 164 pages
Illustrated

This is the little book that is known as “the Bible of the Right-to-Life movement.” The format of the book is a series of questions and answers which focus largely on the various stages of fetal development. On Page 303, there is a list of things that real “right-to-lifers” do. These include: distributing food, working on crisis phone lines, helping abused women, volunteering at hospitals and hospices, working for scouting programs and Meals on Wheels, tutoring, distributing maternity and infant clothing and sharing their homes with a pregnant stranger and foster children. There is also a section on adoption. Hopefully, anybody who makes it up to Page 300 and is ready to act on his/her beliefs will take these suggestions to heart instead of making bombs and stalking doctors. Readers with a taste for the macabre will find a delightful array of ghoulish merchandise advertised for sale in the back of this inflammatory little tome. SA

Publisher: Hayes
Paperback: 325 pages
Illustrated

The art and practice of medicine was “severely retarded” in the 18th century. Call it cruel and unusual healing. Before germ theory, before anesthesia, before magic-bullet pills. Surgery was you, the doctor, a bottle, and a saw. Babies were given opiates to shut them up. Ladies lived with lice in their wigs. Harelips were cut and sewn up while three men held the child down. Smallpox scarred your face for life. And then there was the cure for insanity, a combination of purging, blistering, bleeding, violent sickness, and burning. “In the body, Hippocrates had said, were the four humours. If one or more of the humours were present in excess, mental disturbance would result.” First cure was “the use of drastic purges, or vomits.” If the humour refused to be purged, blood-letting was next, “either by a surgeon’s knife, or by the use of leeches.” Third try was “raising blisters by applying plasters or hot irons to the skin [until] the seared or ulcerated place suffered to run a good while.” Last resort: drill a hole in the head; maybe the humours will escape from the brain. Unless you were rich, failed insanity cures were often farmed out to strangers and “chained in a cellar or garret of a workhouse, fastened to the leg of a table, [or] tied to the post in an outhouse.” Others were cast out into the cold, “like a lost dog or bitch.” RP

Publisher: Academy Chicago
Hardback: 237 pages
Illustrated

What, on the surface, is the connection between the work of art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst, and cargo cults in New Guinea, and autoerotic fatalities? And furthermore, what does it all have to do with the possibility that your neighbor’s forced-air heating system may be emitting inaudible sound waves that cause you needless anxiety and excess sexual excitement?
In his introduction to the Amok Journal: Sensurround Edition, editor Stuart Swezey writes that these and other “accounts of the search for the erotic in the mechanical, the sublime in the visceral, and the spiritual in the electromagnetic,” together constitute a basis for investigating “the neurobiological basis for mystical and ecstatic experience.”
What this means is that despite the endearing presence of an article called “The Love Bug” (the imaginary headline screams: “Man dies making love to Volkswagen”), this is no mere collection of lifestyle marginalia, but a theory of the human defined by its farthest-flung event horizons. An as editorial stylist, Swezey gets at these extreme demarcations of culture and consciousness through the unexpectedly lush language of forensic reports as well as his own dry, neo-Victorian prose. But the cumulative effect of the case studies, interviews and scientific papers collected here is epistemological: in the aggregate, these pieces form a knowledge-based antigen to the feel-good anomie of late-century American culture.
In the introduction to an interview with filmmaker Gualtiero Jacopetti (of the original shockumentary Mondo Cane), Swezey writes, “In contrast to the ubiquitous tabloid TV of our time, Jacopetti’s films make no effort to mask their delight in discovering the bizarre and the grotesque which the world offers. Jacopetti makes no pretense in his narration to a Geraldo-like indignation or an Oprah-esque compassion.” In face of a zeitgeist that has us all individuating indiscriminately just for the applause—and the free therapy—the Amok Journal provides an alternative template, a reading map superimposed over a scramble of seemingly unrelated fringe phenomena, through which the core phenomena of everyday life suddenly leap out in sharp new relief.
How does this work? The Journal takes disparate instances of sexual deviance, covert action and radical thought, e.g. “Rectal Impaction Following Enema With Concrete Mix,” and a Hungarian report to the U.N. “Working Paper on Infrasound Weapons,” and José Ortega y Gasset’s “Meditations on Hunting”: when displayed next to each other in proper context, as they are here, these elements shed their novelty aspects and begin to appear as a seditious commentary on the under-reported risks of individuality, conformity and desire. All of which makes one think, why not go ahead and start to see dating, shopping at the supermarket, and reading the New York Times through the same sharp lens?
As a guidebook, the Amok Journal is a no-nonsense world tour and all-purpose locator for the culturally over-stimulated. As a philosophical/political text, its underlying theme is nothing less than the varietal experience of the all-American (now international) self-made man—who is, of course, the granddaddy of all deviants. HJ

Publisher: Amok
Paperback: 476 pages
Illustrated

Scholarly study of female victims of lost limbs and the men who eroticize them. A recently discovered love twist, it’s known scientifically as acrotomophilia, viewed legally as a “perversion or deviancy” and socially as “kinky.” Presently, there are more than a million amputee women in the United States, and who knows how many paraphiliacs pining for their limbless Madonna.”These men are the ‘devotees’ whose hearts pound when they see a woman with one leg swinging between crutches, men who daydream of dining with a woman with only one hand to cut her steak. These are the men to whom a complete sexual experience means making love to an incomplete woman, an amputee.” Chapters on social stigma, prosthesis problems, sexual fantasies, amputees in literature and film, and women’s personal stories. GR

Publisher: Irvington
Hardback: 337 pages

In which unsurprisingly are extolled the virtues of anal insertion. All angles of anal penetration are covered and… er… probed from a medical perspective covering everything you’d ever need to know from lubrication to laceration. Interestingly, there appears only a brief mention of fisting, and disappointingly none at all of some of the more popular urban myths. It’s nevertheless a fascinating guide to all things relating to anal exploration, with useful hints on the joys of household vegetables and one’s very personal angle of penetration. Recommended reading before you happen to pick up a light bulb for insertion into the nearest convenient orifice. BW

Publisher: Down There
Paperback: 288 pages
Illustrated