MY SECRET LIFE (Volumes I-XI)

Grove Press, 1966-01-01. Paperback. Good. Grove Press GP-416, [Published Date: 1966] . Paper covers, single volume in slip case. Introduction by G. Legman. This edition is a reprint of the entire two-volume Grove Press hard-cover edition of the work. Good+ in acceptable+ slip case. Oversized (15 X 9.75") glossy illustrated paper covers have light bumping to edges and corners and light overall scuffing, aging and soiling. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. Slip case is black Paper over Boards with two paper labels affixed to the front and back. The black paper has some nicking and chipping to a few spots on the back side of the case and at the corner tips and sides with some of the underlying board exposed. The paper labels have scuffing and the back label has some insect damage (silverfishing). Light overall scuffing and soiling to slip case as well. Overall, a nice copy in a somewhat beat-up slipcase. [From back cover of book] This is the first one-volume edition of one of the rarest books of all time. It contains every word of the $30 two-volume Grove Press edition published last year. The work was originally printed privately by the author late in the nineteenth century in an edition limited to six copies, only three of which are known to exist today. One is in the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, another is in the collection of the British Museum, and a third is in a private collection in Europe. The present one-volume edition was taken from the third of these known copies. My Secret Life is the sexual memoir of a well-to-do gentleman of Victorian England, who began at an early age to keep a diary of his erotic behavior. He continued this record for over forty years, creating in the process a unique social and psychological document. Its complete and detailed description of the hidden side of British and European life in the nineteenth century furnishes materials for the understanding of the Victorian Age that cannot be duplicated from any other source. Even if one allows for a fair share of fantasizing and distortion in the author's account of his amatory experiences, its essential credibility, as Professor Steven Marcus notes in his recently published work The Other Victorians, "is not impaired in the least."