Roth, Samuel (editor).

American Aphrodite: A Quarterly for the Fancy-Free. Volume Four / Number Sixteen – [with the printed dedication to Ernest Hemingway]. This Volume includes: “Venus & Adonis” – Behind the Scenes with Catherine, Russia’s Voluptuary Czarina. By Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. / The Merry Muses of Robert Burns / George S. Viereck – Was Shakespeare a Man or a Woman ? / Norman Lockridge – The Women of Plentipunda / etc.

New York, American Aphrodite, 1955. 16.5 cm x 24 cm. 227 pages. Original hardcover with original dustjacket in protective Mylar. Excellent condition with minor signs of external wear. Small tears and some fraying to dustjacket.

Includes for example the following: Venus and Adonis by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch / The Merry Muses of Robert Burns / Sexual Secrets of the Orient / The Babe’s Bed by Glenway Wescott / Animals in a State of Nature: A Story in Pictures by Rubens / The Artist: A Play by Henry L Mencken / Was Shakespeare a Man or a Woman? by George Sylvester Viereck etc.

″American Aphrodite usually featured things like mild erotic line drawings, some piece of long-out-of-print British literature (the “scandalous” seventeenth-century plays of Aphra Behn appear in many issues), a “bawdy” new translation from Chaucer, and something truly shocking, like nude photos of ten-year-old girls taken in Victorian brothels.

And in his 2013 book, Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain, Robert Spoo explains that the magazine contained a typical Rothian stew of slightly dated literature and winking erotica, though some of the material, such as Aubrey Beardsley’s unfinished novel Venus and Tannhäuser, contained stronger sexual content. Woodcuts and drawings of thinly clad or nude women adorned the quarterly’s pages, along with frank poems, such as one inquiring of God whether it is wrong to desire “Two women in one affection, / Two vulvas, four breasts” … Roth’s editorials chided “Madame Post Office” and other official powers for repressing “our rights as American citizens engaged in interpreting the cultural and emotional motives of our time.”

For better or worse, that repression continued with Roth v. United States, in which a six-person majority submitted that obscene material wasn’t protected by the First Amendment, and that said material could be defined as that whose “dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest [to the] average person, applying contemporary community standards.” The court maintained that Congress could ban any material fitting this definition; it upheld Roth’s conviction, and he went to prison. The verdict held until 1973, when it was superseded by Miller v. California, which also involved sending smut through the mail—another story for another day.” (Paris Review)

• Keywords: 20th Century Literature · American Literature · American Literature – Rare · Catalogue Three – Literature by Women · Drama · Erotica · Erotica – Rare · Library & Collection Building · periodical
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 72854AB