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Now who's selling off Princess Margaret's sex book?
Last updated at 15:22pm on 22.09.06
Princess Margaret's book collection, including a lovers' guide, romantic novels and joke books, is going up for auction.
Among the 550 books for sale on 5 October is an 18th century sex guide called The Delights of Wisdom Concerning Conjugial [sic] Love. It was given to Princess Margaret in 1955 - a year after the public scandal over her wish to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend and five years before she married photographer Lord Snowdon.
The book also discusses " scortatory" love - the love of adultery - with sections headed Fornication, Concubinage, the Lusts of Defloration and Seducing Innocents.
Princess Margaret divorced her husband in 1978 after an affair with Roddy Llewellyn, a gardener in his twenties.
A spokeswoman for Bloomsbury Auctions said: "It is an advice book and includes chapters on the causes of separations and divorces in marriages."
The princess's personal copy of the Story of Peter Townsend, a life of her former lover, is also for sale, complete with original cloth spine and "finger soiling".
The revealing sale gives a glimpse of the reading habits of the princess, whose collection includes works by PG Wodehouse and Iris Murdoch.
The spokeswoman said: "This is not very highbrow stuff. There is quite a mixture, with a lot of romantic poetry, quite a few paperbacks and second-rate thrillers.
"They are the staple diet of an English country house - books that would be put away for a rainy day."
Rupert Powell, managing director of Bloomsbury Auctions, refused to say who is selling the books. A spokeswoman for Princess Margaret's son Viscount Linley said the books did not belong to him or any his family. The collection is expected to fetch about £1,350 but an auction of Princess Margaret's personal possessions this summer made £13.6 million - 10 times more than expected.
Reader views (1)
A lover's guide may be taking Swedenborg's book CONJUGIAL LOVE a little too far. The book is about the ideal relationship of a man and woman in a traditional marriage relationship. Swedenborgs says that the love and friendship that can develop between a man and woman in such a commited and exclusive relationship with each other is the greatest gift God has given to the human race. This love is not dirty, but, "pure, clean, above every other love" says Swedenborg. It's probably the most moral book you could ever read about sex and marriage. Swedenborg's very ideal view of Christianity had such followers as Helen Keller, Johnny Appleseed, and Daniel Burnham. Jung and James were both Swedenborgian scholars, and the founder of Al-anon, Lois Wilson, was also a member of the New Church (Swedenborgian).
- Grant Schnarr , Bryn Athyn, PA USA
