Footnotes

BETWEEN THE SHEETS - THE BOOK THAT TITILATED THREE CENTURIES. RARE EDITION WITH ONLY ONE OTHER COPY TRACED.

Aristotle's Master-piece was "the most popular book about women's bodies, sex, pregnancy, and childbirth in Britain and America from its first appearance in 1684 up to at least the 1870s. More than 250 editions are known, but all are very rare..." (The Library Company of Philadelphia, 'Treasures', online catalogue). The work "was still on sale, contents largely unaltered, in Soho sex shops in the 1930s" (Books and Babies, Cambridge Library, 2011) and James Joyce's protagonist Leopold Bloom peruses an edition of the book in Ulysses. The attribution to Aristotle is of course totally spurious and probably a vain attempt to give the work some measure of respectability. It was assembled from Levinus Lemnius's The Secret Miracles of Nature (1564) and Jakob Rüff's midwifery manual De conceptu et generatione hominis (1554).

This 1695 copy bears the early ownership inscriptions of Winifred and Francis Witham. That a woman should own a copy is perhaps, in some ways, not surprising as it provides instructions on midwifery, advice on how to conceive, how to determine whether a woman is expecting a boy or a girl, how to tell false labour from actual labour, etc.; whilst in other ways very surprising as it also provides detailed recommendations and descriptions of intercourse, including racy poems, which earned the book its reputation as a scandalous sex manual. It also asserts the importance of female pleasure in order to conceive, thus justifying its openly erotic discussion of sex and the presence of woodcuts depicting naked women (cf. Mary Fissell, "When the Birds and the Bees Were Not Enough: Aristotle's Masterpiece." The Public Domain Review, August 18, 2015).

No other copies of this 1695 edition have been traced at auction, and only one copy is recorded in institutional libraries (California University Library, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Shelf mark: *RG93.A71m 1695).

Provenance: "Winifrid/ Witham, her booke/ Anno Dom./ 1699", "Francis Witham/ of South Normanton/ his booke/ God give him grace of alhis/ to looke/ Anno Dom./ 1699", contemporary early ownership inscriptions.