Sex Book Gifts for the Holidays

The Rotenberg Collection and the inspired publishers at Quirk Books offer Stacked Decks, featuring images of hundreds of erotic playing cards from 1835 to the present, all illustrated with nude or seminude models, burlesque singers, flappers, 1950s pin-up girls, and accompanied by text from Mark Lee Rotenberg. Perfect for armchair anthropologists, lovers of vintage erotica, and anyone interested in how things have changed -- and how much they haven’t. As is the case with other Quirk books, it's beautiful both inside and out ($25).

Sixteen years in the making, this comic/literary/porn masterpiece, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Melinda Gebbie, features the true life erotic tales of three iconic women from children’s literature -- Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy. It's hard to offer a brief description of all of the wonderful things about Lost Girls, but it's easy to recommend this as a gift for yourself or someone you love. Thoughtful, hot, challenging, and beautifully produced in three hardcover volumes, these are books you will get lost in -- only to find yourself slightly richer, wetter, and more creative than when you first dove in ($75).

This is the book to give yourself, your friend, your lover, or anyone you know who is interested in exploring the role fetishes play, or can play, in our daily sex lives. Violet Blue does an outstanding job of both normalizing and explaining fetish sex without making it boring or unnecessarily freaky. Few people have spent as much quality time searching out fetishes and fetish subcultures online, and we all benefit from Violet’s educated curiosity ($18).

Pornscapes documents a six-year period in the sexual relationship of the photographer, Pierre Radisic, and his partner Anne Bernard. I found it hard to take my eyes off the images, even though many of them are extreme and certainly not for the faint of heart. At their best, the photos in Pornscapes simultaneously jar and arouse, often forcing the viewer to take a minute and orient themselves in order to figure out what exactly is happening, who is doing what, with whom, and with what body parts. The end result is intimate, passionate, and pornographic in the best sense of the term ($25).

Updating and expanding on the concept of the original Cunt Coloring Book, Morgan Hastings offers up 30 illustrations waiting for your chromatic inspiration. The illustrations highlight the difference in external genitalia (pierced and tattooed vulvas are also included in the mix) while encouraging fun genital self-reflection with games such as connect the dots, word search, and “all about my vagina” fill in the blanks. Also available, The Big Coloring Book of Cocks ($9.95).

This third collection of nude portraiture from award-winning fashion photographer Marc Baptise offers dreamy and stunning examinations of the female nude in color and black and white. The images provide an odd juxtaposition: A careful study of form and shape is mixed with revelation of something individual and intimate about the particular model in each shot. I have to agree with the dust jacket description of Baptiste’s nudes as “quietly erotic” even if the claim that the women featured are “of all kinds” doesn’t quite hold up under scrutiny ($45).

Joan Sinclair got herself and her camera inside a host of Tokyo’s sex clubs and offers a guided tour in Pink Box. The book is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at sex work in sex clubs, even as it serves to further cement Tokyo’s reputation as a freaky-sex town ($35).

Featuring 82 photographers from 14 countries, The New Erotic Photography, edited by Dian Hanson and Eric Kroll, offers an excellent overview of contemporary erotic photography from around the world. While many names will be familiar to erotic photography fans, you’re likely to find a couple dozen you’ve never heard of before. Each photographer offers an artist's statement accompanied by several images beautifully reproduced in this 608 page coffee table book ($50).