Book-A-Day 2018 #146: Erotica: The Fine Art of Sex by Edward Lucie-Smith

I'm sure there are worse literary offenses than quoting your own poetry at length in a supposedly non-fictional book.

None come to mind at the moment, but there must be some.

Edward Lucie-Smith does that in Erotica: The Fine Art of Sex. I've tried to forgive him for it. He also presents what's basically a art-history monograph, in a somewhat popularized form, with copious references to specific paintings and other artworks, but then embeds that monograph in a book with copious illustrations of other paintings and other artworks, of similar style and appeal.

(Speaking of quoting, Lucie-Smith has another odd habit: in every chapter, he has a long quote from someone, generally someone old and dead enough to be in the public domain, and then has a shorter pull-quote from the middle of that longer pieces, within a couple of pages of each other. I'm not sure if it's that these are his very favorite quotes of all time, so he wants to keep using them, or if he had a very limited budget for permissions or just words, and had to budget himself severely.)

I'm sure some of the paintings referenced in the text are also reproduced in the book. It would have to happen at least a few times by chance. But the text never says "see page 47," so connecting the two is left to any obsessive readers.

Erotica is a 1997 British book which I saw in its 2003 American edition from Hydra Publishing. I'm sure it existed entirely because sex sells -- and low-priced art books of sex sold quite well in those years before we all had high-speed internet. And I have a copy, I'm pretty sure, because the book-club company I worked for was publishing an edition of Erotica, and I was in the habit then of just grabbing every single book that looked even vaguely of interest.

It sat on the shelf for around fifteen years because a random book of sexy art isn't generally the next thing anyone wants to read under normal circumstances. But I'm doing Book-A-Day this year precisely to clear out random books of various kinds, so I took a whack at it.

And my considered opinion is that no one connected with the publication of the book -- except possible Lucie-Smith -- actually expected anyone to read the text. It's dry, dull in a vaguely academic way, organized haphazardly, and, as I said above, only very loosely connected to the art reproduced here, which is the whole point of this book.

What a reader would want from a book like Erotica is, on the low end, to be titillated for a while and then go on to other things. On the high end, one could hope it would give a potted art-history lecture, focusing on the saucy stuff, that would give you some interesting new facts you could use in your life. Erotica does hit that low end, though the art reproduced here is mostly newer and more heavily photographic than that discussed in the text -- still art photography, though, not anything from skin magazines. But I didn't kind it hit anywhere near the high end: I didn't learn a thing from it, and was bored and confused much of the time, which is not what one wants from a book about sexy art.