The Erotic Spirit

"I have no idea of the difference between sex, erotica and pornography," says Benedikt Taschen. And that's good. The enterprising publisher is building a Great Books list of erotic photos and images. He finds them, he collects them, he publishes them. He has the zeal of a monk in the Dark Ages and his tallow is burning bright. Whether full of contemporary underground fetish photos or post-Civil War era nudes, these manuscripts require no illumination. "I've never found anything bad about any of them," Taschen says. "I just want the books to be stimulating to readers." No problem there. In a Taschen book. we catch episodic, almost stolen, glimpses of private and lost worlds. The older images are the kind that Grandpa would have brought back from Juarez in 1923. As the introduction to Taschen's definitive tome. Erotica Universalis, explains. "There is only one real antidote to the anguish engendered in humanity by its awareness of inevitable death: erotic joy." And people have sought to depict that joy since they could scratch on cave walls. Erotica Universalis shows Egyptian friezes and Greek vases decorated with images of sex worthy of the Starr report. They may have thought the earth was the center of the universe, but they knew all the positions under the sun. 1000 Nudes includes photos of lovelies from the 1860s who helped Civil War soldiers fix their bayonets. Taschen's adult titles also highlight individual artists. Eric Stanton, Elmer Batters, Gil Elvgren, Serge Jacques and Roy Stuart have all been singled out. "I have the greatest respect," says Taschen, "for people who dedicate their lives to their passion." And that passion is repaid: The Elmer Batters book--a foot fetishist's dream--comes bound in a stocking. Another package. Exotique, is a boxed reprint of the 1951--1957 editions of Leonard Burtman's zine of the same name. Burtman's "digest of the bizarre and the unusual" took as inspiration the bondage-oriented pin-up photos of Bettie Page by Irving Klaw, and Exotique was an early outlet for the themes explored by Klaw, photographer Bunny Yeager and cartoonist Eric Stanton. In their pages history comes alive.