The Book of Love: The Story of the Kamasutra

London, United Kingdom: Atlantic Books, 2008. "How did an ancient Hindu treatise come to be the world's best-known sex manual? Part history, part exploration of sexual culture, part philosophical odyssey, The Book of Love tells the story of the Kamasutra in full, from its birth in ancient India to its afterlife in the modern West, where it was found, suppressed and, finally, excitedly rediscovered in the 1960s." "The Kamasutra was written in northern India in the third century A.D., when erotic culture lay at the heart of an exquisite civilization, The Book of Love is a unique portrait of this sensuous era, evoking the world of the pleasure-seeking men and women - for whom the book was written." "It is also the story of the West's discovery of the Kamasutra: how the last surviving manuscripts were tracked down in India by visionary Victorian scholars, and painstakingly translated. It exposes how, with the help of a clandestine coterie of sexual experimenters and iconoclasts, the outrageous explorer Richard Burton unleashed this shocking volume on English society in an attempt to start a revolution. The Book of Love then follows the Kamasutra underground, revealing how it was forced into the hands of pirate pornographers before being thrust once more into the daylight in the wake of the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover." CONDITION 267 pages with illus plate section. Unworn and unread. . Edition Unstated. Soft Cover. New/N/A. 12mo - over 6¾" - 7¾" tall.