Secondhand 1970s Sex & Relationships Bargain Book Box SP2966

Secondhand 1970s Sex & Relationships Bargain Book Box SP2966

Twenty paperbacks from the decade when sex manuals went mainstream: the Hegelers’ ABZ of Love, Chartham’s Sensuous Couple and Advice to Men, Claire Rayner, Rollo May’s Love and Will, de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Shere Hite, and Deborah Blum’s Sex on the Brain. Half sociology, half Panther covers, all of it a time capsule. Adults only.

1. The Single Woman’s Sex Book — Lynn Barber — Barber was a Penthouse journalist before she was the Observer’s star interviewer, and this is her 1975 guide for women who weren’t married and weren’t sorry. Futura.
2. The XYZ of Love — Inge & Sten Hegeler — The Danish sexologists’ follow-up to the ABZ: questions from readers, answered without blushing. Panther, illustrated with the famous black-and-white photographs.
3. Sexual Pleasure in Marriage — Jerome & Julia Rainer — The frank, authoritative advice to married lovers that Panther promised on the cover, from the 1960s American couple who wrote the first mass-market sex manual.
4. The Sensuous Couple — Robert Chartham — The Penthouse book for every couple, by Britain’s best-known sex writer of the day. The one with the gold cover.
5. Advice to Men — Robert Chartham — Chartham answers his postbag: premature ejaculation, impotence, and the questions men wouldn’t ask their doctors in 1970.
6. Nymphomania: A Study of the Oversexed Female — Dr Albert Ellis & Edward Sagarin — Ellis, before he founded cognitive therapy, on a condition that no longer exists. A period piece and a collector’s item.
7. Mainly for Women — Robert Chartham — A practical guide to lovemaking in marriage, Tandem edition, with a quote calling it the best on sexual technique.
8. Living Is Loving — Inge & Sten Hegeler — The Hegelers on love as a way of life rather than a technique. Panther, illustrated.
9. About Sex — Claire Rayner — The agony aunt’s plain-spoken guide: loveplay, frigidity, contraception, vasectomy, in the words on the cover. Fontana.
10. The Marriage Art — John E. Eichenlaub — The doctor’s step-by-step guide that sold three million copies in the 1960s and taught a generation of Americans what their parents hadn’t.
11. Sexual Adventure in Marriage — Jerome & Julia Rainer — The Rainers’ sequel. Panther.
12. Girls and Sex — Wardell B. Pomeroy — The Kinsey researcher’s book for teenage girls, written in 1969 and banned in several American states. Pelican.
13. Sex and the Over-Forties — Robert Chartham — Chartham on the second half of life. NEL.
14. Sexual Honesty: By Women for Women — Shere Hite — The raw questionnaire responses that became The Hite Report, published first by Outback Press in Australia. Rare.
15. An ABZ of Love — Inge & Sten Hegeler — The 1963 Danish encyclopaedia that scandalised Britain and sold a million in hardcover. “An O-level book for adults,” said the Daily Mirror. Fully illustrated.
16. Love and Will — Rollo May — Sex without will is empty and will without love is tyranny: the existential psychologist’s 1969 argument, which Newsweek called extraordinary. Fontana.
17. Sex on the Brain — Deborah Blum — The biological differences between men and women, from a Pulitzer-winning science writer, and more careful than the title suggests. New York Times Notable Book.
18. The Evolution of Human Sexuality — Donald Symons — The 1979 sociobiology classic: why men and women want different things, argued from evolution. Still cited, still argued with.
19. The Second Sex — Simone de Beauvoir — One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. The 1949 book that started the second wave. Penguin Modern Classics.
20. Becoming Orgasmic — Julia Heiman & Joseph LoPiccolo — The sexual growth programme for women that sex therapists still assign, in the original edition.