Behind its lurid yellow cover, The Lure of Lust — Oscar Meredith’s “uninhibited study of erotic practices and behaviour past and present” — is a pulp paperback dressed up as sexology. The cover promises heat, the pages deliver history, guiding the reader from sex and seduction in the scriptures to vice in the Victorian era. Very much of its time, it belongs to the 1960s fashion for eroticism packaged as scholarship.

This Tallis Press paperback, published in 1969, is the first and only edition.