Forbidden Books of the Victorians. Henry Spencer Ashbee's Bibliographies of Erotica. Abridged and edited.

Article number 10224070

An abridged selection of Henry Spencer Ashbee's nineteenth-century bibliographies documenting erotic and sexually explicit literature, edited with an introduction and explanatory notes by Peter Fryer. Ashbee, a prominent Victorian book collector, systematically recorded works that were frequently published anonymously, circulated privately or excluded from conventional literary catalogues. His descriptions provide information about authorship, publication histories, editions, illustrations and the commercial networks through which such books circulated. The collection offers insight into Victorian attitudes towards sexuality, censorship, collecting and the boundaries of acceptable literature.