Damenklub
Maskenbälle
Lustiger Abend
Café Dorian Gray.
These spots were instigations to perversions, amatory practices, and promiscuities.
Numerous collections of erotica exist in varying degrees of seclusion, in libraries, state archives, and museums. To a large extent, such compilations were made during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The bibliophile, on his death, usually bequeathed his books and manuscripts and erotic objects and artifacts to a state or national library. Among English specialists in this genre were James Campbell, the pseudonym of J. C. Reddie, William S. Potter, Henry Spencer Ashbee, better known under his pseudonym of Pisanus Fraxi. In France, the Bibliothèque Nationale, in its section known as L’Enfer, houses a large collection of erotic matter.
In cosmopolitan cities like London and New York, the sex theme is predominant in certain types of rather furtive bookstores. They deal largely with paperbacks, stressing sexual relationships, erotic magazines, and treatises, both authoritatively written and, in some cases, barely literate, on erotic mores and variations of perversions. The paperbacks, flaunting jackets that play a significant role in the attraction of the text, range from lust to rape, from masochism to tribadism, with all possible intermediate permutations. Such fictional productions not infrequently transcend the ingenuities of the Marquis de Sade.