110
STEVEN MARCUS
In
the course of his summary of the contents of this volume,
Hotten offers his customers a few examples of Priapus worship; one
of these, he states, is "the horse-shoe placed over a stable or other
door, or nailed to the orchard-gate," which represents "nothing more
or less than a bent priapus-the twisted and perverted emblem of
an
ancient creed, that numbered, probably, more devout followers than
any other humanly-devised system of worship." This seems like a
charming, if distinctly odd, pseudo-fact until one consults the passage
in Wright's essay to which it refers. "Thus the figure of the female
organ," Wright states, "easily assumed the rude form of a horseshoe,
and as the original meaning was forgotten, would be readily taken for
that object, and a real horseshoe nailed up for the same purpose. In
this way orignated . . . the vulgar practice of nailing a horseshoe
upon buildings to protect them and all they contain against the
power of witchcraft." One need not from this conclude that confu–
sion of mind is always accompanied by confusion of sex. This little slip
in the life of a busy pornographer does, however, help to reveal the
typical care with which Hotten took his subject to himself and dramatizes
the motto of his business-anything goes.
The second example concerns a work which Hotten intended as
another sequel to Payne Knight's treatise. This book was written
by
John Davenport, a semi-learned pornographic hack whom Ashbee
regards with a certain amount of sympathy and respect. The book
is called
Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs,
and Ashbee speaks of it
as "an able and erudite work, well written, and fairly exhaustive of
the subjects it treats of." It is none of these, unless one equates learn–
ing with the ability to copy out one's notes or repeat stories; in
this
sense gossip is a form of erudition. At the bottom of the title page is
printed, "London: Privately Printed. 1869." The work was in fact
printed in 1873-Hotten died before it came out of the press. But
the
custom of back-dating a new text is as common in this business as
the
practice of up-dating an old one ; and one may add that in about
half the cases of this practice no conceivable function is served.
Ex·
cept perhaps a psychological one-namely, that in the pornography
business one should try as a rule never 'to tell the truth about
any·
thing; one should in fact lie on principle and transform petty fraud
into a way of life. Hotten also wrote a circular in advertisement of
this work, whose first paragraph reads: "Beautifully printed on toned
paper, and only ONE HUNDRED COPIES, for private distribution.
... £2. lOs." In reality, Ashbee lets us know, two hundred and fifty
copies were printed; about half of these were sold in Europe, and
the
remainder went
«en bloc"
to
J.
W. Bouton of New York, a bookseller
with
