THE ILLUSTRATED KAMA SUTRA

Park Street Press, Rochester, Vermont, 1991, reprint.  ISBN 0-89281-441-1.  Large soft cover, 156 pages.  A bit of edge wear, wraps have light scratches and impressions; binding sound, no reading creases; bit of soil on bottom page block.  Interior clean and unmarked; printed on heavier stock paper; colour photos and illustrations throughout.  ‘Here, for the first time, Sir Richard Burton and F. F. Arbuthnot’s translations of three classic Eastern love texts have been published in one volume, illustrated in color with a dazzling and unique collection of Indian painting and sculpture.  These erotic treatises are not “sex manuals” in the modern sense – clinical collections of coital postures – but a more encompassing and sensitive exploration of Eastern sexual customs.  The idea that something as natural as sexuality could be shameful in any way would have been incomprehensible to the old sage Vatsyayana who wrote Kama Sutra as a religious duty nearly 2,000 years ago.  Kalyana Malla wrote his Ananga-Ranga with the worthy intention of preventing “separation of the married pair.”  And even if Sheikh Nefzawi was a little less pious in intention, he can be forgiven for the poetry and humor in his Perfumed Garden.’ (from rear wrap)