Germans are not really famous for their great passions or pleasures. Abroad, people like to watch them falling under the tables at carnival or at the October Fest, drunk and merry. Tacitus seems to have known this side. He tells tales of the ancestors of the Germans, in classical Rome. He found them a hard and wild tribe that loved to roam the wilderness, stark naked. Indestructible even then but not really prepared to enjoy lust and pleasure.

David M. Friedman's A Mind of Its Own is a cultural examination of the penis, from ancient Sumer to the present. Friedman convincingly suggests that humankind's various and contradictory attitudes toward the penis have been instrumental in mapping the course of both Western civilization and world history. 

Venice, Paris and other cities where Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) restlessly traveled are brought to vivid life by food and travel writer Kelly (Cooking for Kings). Remembered today primarily for his sex life, Casanova was a polymath who trained to be a priest, worked as a violinist, soldier, faith healer and librarian, made and lost fortunes and wrote 42 books plus plays and opera libretti. He was born to an actress in Venice who thought the sickly boy was an imbecile and sent him away, aged nine, to be educated in Padua, where he flourished. The 17-year-old had his first sexual affair with two sisters, a scenario repeated throughout his life with other sisters, mothers and daughters, and even nuns. This life of sexual adventures produced eight illegitimate children and included falling in love with an apparent castrato who turned out to be a woman en travestie; he also enjoyed a life of wealth and social status in Venice after saving the life of a senator. Imprisoned there by the Inquisition, he escaped to Paris, becoming a fixture on the city's social scene. Kelly presents a colorful, sprightly biography of a singular man.

Prioleau's captivating debut is a fervid self-help tract well-disguised as a history. "Seductresses are in fact the liberated women incarnate," asserts the author in her opening chapter. "They're the stealth heroines of history. The first feminists." It's a persuasive argument, which Prioleau pounds home with massive fists full of quotations, attributions and texts from anthropology, religion, psychology, history, art, literature, music and anything else she can get her hyperintellectual hands on. Modern women have lost their goddess-centered groove, the Manhattan College professor asserts, and as a consequence the entire race is going to hell in a male-dominated, bimbo-focused handbasket.

Hard on the heels of the film Moulin Rouge comes this idiosyncratic meditation on that 18th- and 19th-century curiosity, the courtesan, the woman who, though usually from limited means, parlayed her beauty, sexuality and talent into a position of luxury and celebrity as the mistress of one or several men of means. Readers looking for a sober social history of the world portrayed in the film will not find it here, for Griffin's approach is almost as kaleidoscopic as the movie's. In a series of brief chapters, each devoted to a particular "virtue," that is, a talent central to the courtesan's success (such as "Gaiety," "Charm," "Cheek"), feminist critic, playwright and poet Griffin (What Her Body Thought; Women and Nature; etc.) mines the memoirs of her subjects for stories illustrating their ability to vault beyond the constraints of their age and gender.

A good job of an impossible task, looking beyond the borders of North America, Australia and northern Europe to include people who have made important contributions from outside the gay and lesbian mainstream.

Do we really know pornography when we see it? Pornography is condemned for being "too close" while erotica is defended as "leaving room for the imagination." And the art of the nude is treated as something much more special, located even further away from the potential of arousal. Art/Porn argues that these distinctions are based on an age-old antithesis between sight and touch, an antithesis created and maintained for centuries by art criticism.

Naomi Harris's subjects are not the usual perfected androids who populate contemporary erotica, but ordinary people with extraordinary sex lives; this book explores a rarely-seen side of sex in America.
This edition is limited to 1,000 numbered copies, signed by both Naomi Harris and Richard Prince. The cover features a four-color, silk screened, 3-dimensional stamped metal reproduction of a classic American motel sign, specially conceived and created for this edition.