(Updated)
What may be the world's oldest existing piece of printed porn will be auctioned off next month, and is expected to sell for up to 65 thousand dollars.
"Sodom," penned in the mid-1670s, has been attributed to John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester and is described by auction house Sotheby's as a "closet drama rather than for the stage" with pornography "in almost every line." (…) The book centers on the decision made by a lustful King to "set the nation free" by allowing "buggary" to be "used thro' all the land" and then details the dire consequences.
Link to news item (Thanks, Sandy)
Here are the auction item details, including this amazing image, on Sothebys.com: Link. The work is both porn and protest:
Although in every sense, and in almost every line, pornographic (even though its humour sometimes recalls that in Aristophanes' Lysistrata), the play has two primary purposes: one literary, the other political. One aim is the production of a hilarious burlesque of the then fashionable 'heroic' plays… Its other main aim, however, is to satirise uncompromisingly the court of Charles II – not only the notoriously lecherous Charles himself, with all his mistresses ("Thus, in the zenith of my lust I reign"), but also the venality of his courtiers, who are depicted as slavishly imitating him and indulging in the common state of moral and sexual anarchy.
