Gems of British social history series, 1978–1982

Between 1978 and 1982, Paul Harris published six facsimiles of eighteenth and nineteenth century erotic texts under the series title: "Gems of British social history series".

For the record, these six volumes are:

1. Directory Of the Ladies of Pleasure in Edinburgh [1775] (1978)
2. The Gentleman's Bottle Companion [1768] (1978)
3. The Secret Cabinet of Robert Burns [aka The Merry Muses of Caledonia] (1979)
4. Low Life in Victorian Edinburgh [1851] (1980)
5. Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies Or Man of Pleasure's Kalender for the Year 1793 (1982)
6. Records of the Most Ancient and Puissant Order of the Beggar's Benison and Merryland, Anstruther (1982)

I bought a copy of The Gentleman's Bottle Companion facsimile in 1989, but now have all four of the eighteenth century texts (nos. 1, 2, 3, 5). I have long considered the Beggar's Benison and Merryland volume to be a nineteenth century fabrication, but I am beginning to change my mind on this.

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Regarding no.2: in 2000, when Alexander Pettit and I first started work on our five-volume anthology of Eighteenth Century British Erotica (2002), I was tasked with choosing the texts. Since I wanted to include The Gentleman's Bottle Companion, and could find no record of it in any library, I tried to get in touch with Harris.

In early 2001, after spamming a series of publishers that he had work with (Beekhan Publishers in New York, the US distributor for his facsimiles; Werner Shaw Limited, who had published one of his books, etc.), I managed to reach him, in East Timor of all places.

Little did I know what a wild life Harris had been living since he published his facsimile in 1978. His 2009 autobiography is titled More Thrills than Skills: adventures in journalism, war and terrorism, having become a war corresponded, covering eighteen wars between 1991 and 2001 (for basic details, see Wikipedia.)

Astonishingly, it turned out that, no only did he actually own the original, and still the only known, copy of The Gentleman's Bottle Companion, but he had it with him in East Timor! Somehow, I persuaded him to sell it to Monash. I don't have any of the emails from that far back, but from memory it wasn't actually that difficult to persuade him. I think he was probably quite happy to see the book go somewhere safe, or safer than where he was. He must have been feeling the burden of responsibility for preserving, in the middle of a war zone, the only known copy of such a book.

Although he was glad to sell the book, he knew what it was worth, so there was no chance I could buy it myself. He asked something like A$5000, ten to twenty times the amount I usually had in the bank at the time. I am not sure how I managed to persuade the bank to extend my credit that far, but they did, and quickly. I sent the money before he could reconsider, the book was sent, Monash reimbursed me, and by the end of 2001 I was able to supply Pickering and Chatto with a fresh copy of the book for our Eighteenth Century British Erotica, with Monash as the holding library.

Unfortunately, although I once had it in my house, and included it in an exhibition I curated on "Lewd and Scandalous Books" in 2010, I have no photo of it. No image of the book is included in the catalogue, which you can download here. However, there is a facsimile of the title-page and an OCR scan of the text here.