Speaking of sex and the good ol days:

Cabinet of Love shows seedy success of 18th century poetry in Oxford University revelation

When a compilation of works by some of the finest poets of the day was published in 1714, the presence of names such as Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and their peers should have been enough to ensure a bestseller.

The book they appeared in, The Works of the Earls of Rochester and Roscommon, flew off the shelves, but a new discovery suggests that their success owed more to a sordid insert than a deep public hunger for highbrow art at the dawn of the Georgian era.

“I had just finished entering details of poems typical of miscellanies of the period – satires, imitations and amatory verse – when at the end of the second volume a new title page announced the start of The Cabinet of Love,” confides Dr Claudine van Hensbergen, who was cataloguing compendiums for Oxford University’s Digital Miscellanies Index project when he found the addition to the book.

“To my surprise, The Cabinet turned out to be a collection of pornographic verse about dildos. The poems include Dildoides, a poem attributed to Samuel Butler about the public burning of French-imported dildos, The Delights of Venus, a poem in which a married woman gives her younger friend an explicit account of the joys of sex, and The Discovery, a poem about a man hiding in a woman’s room to watch her masturbate in bed.”

[…]

Pretty racy for the good ol days, eh?